Between those hedges and through those fields Wellfield wandered as one distraught–not with any outward appearance of disorder, but with inwardly such an agony of remorse and self-reproach as was rapidly gaining the ascendency over his judgment and reason. Long fasting, and watching beside that cold mask which had been all that remained of Nita’s countenance, and upon whose placid features he had thought to detect a fixed and marble reproach, silent but terrible, and which haunted him ceaselessly–all this had combined to raise him into a wild, excited frame of mind, in which he was scarce master of his impulses or actions. As he watched, in the rapidly-gathering dusk, the deep and swiftly-running river, the desire presented itself again and again to quench therein this unabating torture of mind: each time the temptation came more insidiously, and the plausible excuse incessantly recurred, that he had proved himself unfit to manage his own affairs, and that those who were left behind would much better manage those of his child–his child whom he had not yet been able to look upon. It went so far that at last he stood beside the river, and looked and looked, until to his morbid perceptions it seemed to shape its murmurs into words that invited him to come. Deep down in his nature he was profoundly superstitious. There was an old record of a Wellfield who had been unhappy, and had destroyed himself in this very river. Jerome thought in his madness, ‘Well, wherever he is, I may go too, I suppose. There can be nothing in the future–on the other side, as bad as this.... I believe all I have gone through has been sent to show me that I have no right to remain here any longer ... besides, a life for a life! I have taken Nita’s, and...’ He stood on the very edge of the stream towards which he had unconsciously drawn, and was looking down into it as it hurried past, with a vague, fascinated gaze. Would it ever have come to the point of throwing himself in? Probably not. Suicides are not such as he. His remorse doubtless was horrible. But if he _had_ taken that cold plunge, it would have been, not from a sense that he was too unworthy a wretch to live, but because life was so intensely uncomfortable–to _him_. Be that as it may, he stood on the brink, in a dreamy ecstasy–a luxury, as it were, of grief and self-reproach, interspersed with vague wonder why women would fall in love with him, when: ‘You walk late beside the river, Wellfield,’ said Somerville’s voice, while at the same moment the priest laid his slender, fragile-looking, yet muscular fingers upon his arm.