The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red to pulsating, and finally dead, ash. Lost in the bitterness of his thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire. He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such scarring records as his own. Were there everywhere, back of each heart, puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public view? And now--Mariana! Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly as these others. Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little different. Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain words, her challenging courage forbade them. Here was more than could be arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment. Or perhaps this was only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth. The first Howat and Jasper, striking contemptuously across the barriers of social morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in illegitimate circumstance, and in himself--an old man without family, without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely dragging at his bandanna. But he discovered that his hand was numb with cold. The fire lay black and dead. The shrilling wind, ladened with snow, wrenched at the shutters. The room was bitter. He must get up to bed ... warm blankets. A chill touched him with an icy breath. It overtook him midway on the stair, and he clung to the railing, appalled at its violence in his fragile being. He got, finally, to his room, to the edge of his bed, where he sat waiting for the assault to subside. He wanted Rudolph, but the effort to move to the door, call, appeared insuperable. The chill left him; and blundering, hideously delayed, he wrapped himself in the bed covering. Not all the wool in the world, he thought, would be sufficient to drive the cold from his body. He fell into a temporary exhaustion of sleep; but was waked later by sharp and oppressive pains in his chest, deepening when he breathed. The suffering must be mastered, and he lay with gripping hands, striving by force of will to overcome what he thought of as the brutal play of small, sharp knives. He conquered, it seemed; the pain grew less; but it had left an increasing difficulty in his breathing; it was a labour to absorb sufficient air even for his small, aged demands. Sleep deserted him; and he waited through seeming years for the delayed appearance of dawn. He had hoped that the new day would be sunny, warm; it was overcast, he could see the snow drifted in the lower window panes.