CHAPTER V.
In the meantime the elder of the brothers Trenholme had not the satisfaction of meeting with Sophia Rexford, or of going to see the strange old man laid away in his last resting-place.
Robert Trenholme lay in his house, suffering a good deal of physical pain, suffering more from restlessness of nerve caused by his former tense activity, suffering most from the consideration of various things which were grievous to him.
He had been flouted by the woman he loved.

The arrow she had let fly had pierced his heart and, through that, his understanding.

He never told her, or anyone, how angry he had been at the first stab that wounded, nor that, when the familiar sound of his brother's voice came to him in the midst of this anger, he had been dumb rather than claim kindred in that place with the young man who, by his actions, had already taken up the same reproach.

No, he never told them that it was more in surly rage than because he had slipped in the ditch that he had let them go on without him in the darkness; but he knew that this had been the case; and, although he was aware of no momentous consequences following on this lapse, he loathed himself for it, asking by what gradual steps he had descended to be capable of such a moment of childish and churlish temper.

He was a product of modern culture, and had the devil who had overcome him been merely an unforgiving spirit, or the spirit of sarcastic wit or of self-satisfied indifference, he might hardly have noticed that he had fallen from the high estate of Christian manhood, even though the fiend jumped astride his back and ambled far on him; but when he found that he had been overcome by a natural impulse of passionate wrath he was appalled, and was philosopher enough to look for the cause of such weakness prior to the moment of failure.