Hugh came to the shop at eight. On other mornings, all through that long week of waiting, Clara had driven him to his work, the two riding in silence down Medina Road and through the crowded streets of the town; but on that morning he had walked. On Medina Road, near the bridge where he had once stood with Clara and where he had seen her hot with anger, something had happened, a trivial thing. A male bird pursued a female among the bushes beside the road. The two feathered, living creatures, vividly colored, alive with life, pitched and swooped through the air. They were like moving balls of light going in and out of the dark green of foliage. There was in them a madness, a riot of life. Hugh had been tricked into stopping by the roadside. A tangle of things that had filled his mind, the wheels, cogs, levers, all the intricate parts of the hay-loading machine, the things that lived in his mind until his hand had made them into facts, were blown away like dust. For a moment he watched the living riotous things and then, as though jerking himself back into a path from which his feet had wandered, hurried onward to the shop, looking as he went not into the branches of trees, but downward at the dust of the road. In the shop Hugh tried all morning to refurnish the warehouse of his mind, to put back into it the things blown so recklessly away. At ten Tom came in, talked for a moment and then flitted away. “You are still there. My daughter still has you. You have not run away again,” he seemed to be saying to himself. The day grew warm and the sky, seen through the shop window by the bench where Hugh tried to work, was overcast with clouds. At noon the workmen went away, but Clara, who on other days had come to drive Hugh to the farmhouse for lunch, did not appear. When all was silent in the shop he stopped work, washed his hands and put on his coat. He went to the shop door and then came back to the bench. Before him lay an iron wheel on which he had been at work. It was intended to drive some intricate part of the hay-loading machine. Hugh took it in his hand and carried it to the back of the shop where there was an anvil. Without consciousness and scarcely realizing what he did he laid it on the anvil and taking a great sledge in his hand swung it over his head. The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to Clara. The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh's head and out through a window, breaking a pane of glass. Fragments of the broken glass fell with a sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel lying beside the anvil....