He passed them and ran across the ploughed field, while the others went down the hill, talking and laughing. He heard the sound of their voices and that light laughter dying away on the still air as the distance widened between him and them; and he wondered if they were talking of his wife, and of his seeming indifference to her folly. The crisis had come. He had watched her in blank amazement, hardly able to believe his own senses, to realize the possibility of guilt on the part of one whose very perfection had galled him; and now he told himself there was no doubt of her folly, no doubt that this tinselly pretender had fascinated her, and that she was on the verge of destruction. No woman could outrage propriety as she had been doing of late, and yet escape danger. The business must be stopped somehow, even if he were forced to kick the Baron out of doors, in order to make an end of the entanglement. And then, what if she were to lift up her voice, and accuse him--if she were to turn that knowledge which he suspected her of possessing, against him? What then? He must face the situation, and pay the penalty of what he had done. That was all. "It can't much matter what becomes of me," he said to himself. "I have never had an hour's real happiness since I married her. She warned me that it would be so--warned me against my own jealous temper--but I wouldn't listen to her. I had my own way." Could she care for that man? Could she? In spite of the coarseness of his own nature, there was in Leonard's mind a deep-rooted conviction of his wife's purity, which was stronger even than the evidence of actual facts. Even now, although the time had come when he must act, he had a strange confused feeling, like a man whose brain is under the influence of some narcotic, which makes him see things that are not. He felt as in some hideous dream--long-involved--a maze of delusion and bedevilment, from which there was no escape. He went down into the hollow. The high wooden gate stood wide open--evidence that there was some one lingering below. The leaves were still on the trees, the broad feathery ferns were still green. There was a low yellow light gleaming behind the ridge of rock and the steep earthy slope above. The rush of the water sounded loud and clear in the silence. Leonard crept cautiously down the winding moss-grown track, holding his dogs behind him in a leash, and constraining those well-mannered brutes to perfect quiet. He looked down into the deep hollow, through which the water runs, and over which there is that narrow foot bridge, whence the waterfall is seen in all its beauty--an arc of silvery light cleaving the dark rock above, and flashing down to the dark rock below.