The great humiliation and wrong--the fact that he had been rejected with open contumely by the rich girl he had planned to marry--lay steadily day and night upon the confines of his consciousness, like a huge black morass with danger signals hung upon all its borders. His perverse mind kept returning to view these menacing signals, and torturing him with threats to disregard them and plunge into the forbidden darkness. The constant strain to hold his thoughts back from this hateful abyss wore upon him like an unremitting physical pain. The resolve which had chilled and stiffened him into self-possession that afternoon in the drawingroom, and had even enabled him to speak with cold distinctness to Mrs. Minster and to leave the house of insult and defeat with dignity, had been as formless and unshaped as poor, heart-torn, trembling Lear’s threat to his daughters before Gloster’s gate. Revenge he would have--sweeping, complete, merciless, but by what means he knew not. That would come later. Two weeks were gone, and the revenge seemed measurably nearer, though still its paths were all unmapped. It was clear enough to the young man’s mind now that Tenney and Wendover were intent on nothing less than plundering the whole Minster estate. Until that fatal afternoon in the drawingroom, he had kept himself surrounded with an elaborate system of self-deception. He had pretended to himself that the designs of these associates of his were merely smart commercial plans, which needed only to be watched with equal smartness. Now the pretence was put aside. He knew the men to be villains, and openly rated them as such in his thoughts. He had a stem satisfaction in the thought that their schemes were in his hands. He would join them now, frankly and with all his heart, only providing the condition that his share of the proceeds should be safe-guarded. They should have his help to wreck this insolent, purse-proud, newly rich family, to strip them remorselessly of their wealth. His fellow brigands might keep the furnaces, might keep everything in and about this stupid Thessaly. He would take his share in hard coin, and shake the mud and slush of Dearborn County from off his feet. He was only in the prime of his youth. Romance beckoned to him from a hundred centres of summer civilization, where men knew how to live, and girls added culture and dowries to beauty and artistic dress. Oh, yes! he would take his money and go.