Before him loomed a picture like a window opening upon Newlyn. The village lay there in all the flame and glory of sunset lights. The gray and black roofs clustered up the great dark hill and the gloaming fell out of a primrose sky over sea and land. The waters twinkled full of light to the very foreground of the canvas, and between the piers of the harbor a fisher-boy was sculling his boat. Between the masts of stone-schooners at the quay, Joe saw the white cottage of the Tregenzas, and there his survey stopped, for at this spectacle thought broke loose. No man ever paid a nobler tribute to a good picture. Very long he gazed motionless, then, with a great sigh, moved slowly forward, his eyes still turning back. The day and the experience which it brought him marked a considerable flux of new impressions in Joe's mind--impressions which, without softening the rugged aspect of his determination, yet added other lines of reflection. Sorrow for what was lost fastened upon him, and an indignation burned his soul that such things could be in a world designed and ordered by the Almighty. Revenge, however, grew no less desirable in the light of sorrow. He looked to it more and more eagerly as the only food which could lead to peace of mind. His road probably embraced the circumstances of an ignominious death; but none the less peace would follow--a peace beyond the power of future life on earth to supply. Thus, at least, did his project then present itself to him. Thought of the meeting with his enemy grew to be a luxury which he feasted upon in the night watches after fruitless days and the investigation of endless miles of pictures. Then he would lie awake and imagine the inevitable climax. He saw himself standing before the man who had ruined two lives; he felt his hand close over a knife or a pistol, and wondered which it should be; he heard his own voice, slow and steady, pronounce sentence of death, and he saw terror light that other man's face as the blood fled from it. He rehearsed the words he should utter at that great juncture and speculated as to what manner of answer would come; then the last scene of all represented his enemy stretched dead at his feet and himself with his hands linked in iron. There yet remained the end of the tragedy for him--a spectacle horrible enough in the eyes of those still left to love him, but for himself empty of terror, innocent of power to alarm. Clean-living men would pity him, religious men would see in him an instrument used by God to strike at a sinner. His death would probably bring some wanderers to the fold; it must of a surety be long remembered as the greatest sermon lived and preached by a Luke Gospeler. Lulled by the humming woof and warp of such reflections, his mind nightly passed into the unconsciousness of sleep; and quickened by subsequent visions, the brain enacted these imaginings with an added gloom and that tremendous appearance of reality proper to the domain of dreams.