Mrs. Ransom kept her room for several days. The shock she had received from Reynolds' confession carried with it something more than the predicament might at first view imply. She had loved her husband with all that romantic fervor characteristic of girlhood in a warm climate. He was a handsome youth, bright, impulsive, brave, passionate, reckless, holding her to him by that strange fascination, which we all know but can not account for, exerted by the bad over the good. When he had appeared to desert her she was not surprised, and the news of his death by murder saddened without shocking her beyond endurance. With the lapse of time the effect of her trouble had softened and faded; but she had never ceased to remember with a warmth of devotion, more of the imagination than of the heart, perhaps, the lover and the husband of her romantic girlhood. To be sure it had grown to seem no more than a tender dream, that period of love and happiness ending in gloom, but its memory haunted her. Reynolds had in some way thrilled her life with something more potent than that girlish adoration with which she had honored her boyish husband. His influence over her was so strange and so new to her experience, so sweet and yet so masterful, so overwhelming. His love had shown her how little she had ever known of love before, love in its highest and perfectest development. But this dreadful discovery--this dark, strange confession, fell upon her just at the time when it could have the effect of darkening as with the shadow of both crime and death the whole of her life. It seemed a stroke of fate so malignant, so merciless, so far-reaching, so unutterably terrible. Reynolds suffered, but not as she did. He was gloomy, impatient, restless, but his wound continued to heal rapidly and his bodily strength hourly increased. His physical constitution was so elastic and vigorous that nothing, it seemed, could long disturb its equilibrium. Mentally, however, he was a man of extremes, surging to the furthest stretch of the tether in whatever direction impelled. Now he was in the deepest pit of despondency. The whole light of life had gone out. As if to render his state more dreary by contrast, the weather waxed with sudden fervor into all the golden splendor of a semi-tropical spring. A sprinkling of pale green tassels and tender leaflets appeared on certain deciduous trees, and the grasses peculiar to the region began to shoot up bright spikes in the warmer spots of the brown fallow fields. A dainty woody odor pervaded the air and the mocking birds and brown thrushes sang gayly in the old trees about the mansion. The sky assumed a hue of such rich, tender azure as is observed nowhere save in the low country in especially favorable weather. And the river (what stream is more beautiful than the Alabama?) seemed to go by with some rhythmic impulse but half repressed in its broad, almost silent current.