Of Zyp I hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than tremulously hover round the thought that Modred’s death had absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. Still the thought was there and perhaps I only played with self-deception when I affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. I could not live with and not long for her with all the passion I was capable of. Therefore it was that I dreaded any possible disclosure of a suspicion on her part--dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of evil. But it was Jason I feared most. Something--I can hardly give it a name--had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. In the unfolding of this new faculty I was startled and distressed to observe deformities in my brother where I had before seen nothing but manly beauty and a breezy recklessness that I delighted in. Beautiful bodily, I and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to my new sense. This I can but describe, with despair of the melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. The pupils were as full and purple as berries of the deadly nightshade. It was not, however, his eyes only that baffled me. I saw that he coveted any novelty of sensation greedily, and that sooner than forego enjoyment of it he would ruthlessly stamp down whatever obstacle to its attainment crossed his path. Now I knew in my heart that his hitherto indifference to Zyp was an affectation born only of wounded vanity, and that such as he could never voluntarily yield so piquant a prize to homelier rivals. I recalled, with a brooding apprehension, certain words of his on that fatal morning, that seemed intended to convey, at least, a dark suspicion as to the manner of Modred’s death. Probably they were bolts shot at random with a sinister object--for I could conceive no shadow of direct evidence against me. In that connection they might mean much or little; in one other I had small doubt that they meant a good deal--this in fact, that, if I got in his way with Zyp, down I should go. Daily probing and analyzing such darkly dismal problems as these, I slowly crawled through convalescence to recovery.