Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/39

 and the whole universe appeared to tremble about him, when he was like, a tree shaken in a tempest. He became prey to a vague sense of misery from which he found rest only by tramping for hours along the borders of the lake. At such times it seemed that there lay before him only bafflement and frustration. Once he came to his senses in horror to find himself at the edge of the lake ready to commit the greatest of sins, that of murdering himself, a servant of God.

From then on he suffered a new horror—that he might be going mad.

Sometimes in the night he lay restless and tormented, scarcely knowing what it was that gave him no peace save that it was in some way concerned with Naomi lying in the hut opposite him in the glow of the fire. She slept like a child, her face lighted with the familiar look of bland satisfaction—Naomi whom he had never approached, whom he had never kissed since the day of the wedding years and years ago, it seemed now, in that black and sooty town on the other side of the world. To touch her, to attempt the horrible thing he could not put from his mind, would, he knew, turn their tiny, intense world into a hell and so destroy all they had built up with so much agony and terror.

He was afraid of her for some profound, unnamable reason. In the long, still nights, when every sound took on the violence of an explosion, he had at times a sinister feeling that he stood at the edge of a yawning chasm into which she might precipitate the three of them by so much as crossing the room.

For it had been arranged long ago in the darkened parlor of his mother's house that he and Naomi were