In the cabin on the hillside Harry had watched the rage of the elements with a dull sense of accord; it typified the wild range of feeling in which his soul had been harried. Battle had been the keynote of a series of days and doings of which the tense awakening in Jessica's chamber, with its supreme moment of passion and longing, had been a weird culmination. As he made his way down the mountain in the blank and heavy dark, correcting his path by the lightning, he had faced squarely the question that in that dim room had become an imminent demand. "_What if I love her!_ What right have I to love her, with a wretched name like mine? She has refinement, a measure of wealth, no doubt, and I am poor as poverty, dependent on the day's grubbing in the ditch for to-morrow's bacon and flour. Yet that would not stand in the way! I am no venal rogue, angling for the loaves and fishes. Whatever else she cursed me with, Nature gave me a brain, and culture and experience have educated it. With hand or brain I can hew my own niche to stand in! Must I put away the longing that drove me to her in sleep, with her dawning love that shielded me? And if, knowing all, she love me, must the past, that is so unreal to me, block my way to happiness? I am putting it deep underground, and its ghost shall not rise! Time passes, reputations change. Mine will change. And when I have squared my living here, the world is wide. What does it matter who she is, if she is the one woman for me? What does it matter what I have been, if I shall be that no longer?" So he had argued, but his argument ended always with the same stern and unanswerable conclusion: "To drag her down in order to lift myself! Because she pities me--pity is akin to love!--shall I take advantage of her interest and innocence? Shall I play upon divine compassion and sinister propinquity, like any mean adventurer who inveigles a romantic girl into marrying a rascal to reform him?"