The state of happiness so exalted that it became almost holiness, in which he had been that very night, flung him to lower depths when it was retroverted.

He had gone back to first causes in the one and he did the same in the other; his joy had reached out into eternity, and so did his misery.

His natural religious bent, inherited from generations of Puritans, and kept in its channel by his training from infancy, made it impossible for him to conceive of sympathy or antagonism in its fullest sense apart from God.
Sitting on a pile of shavings in a corner of the north room, he fairly hugged himself with fierce partisanship.

"What have I done to be treated in this way ?" he demanded, setting his face ahead in the darkness; and he did not see Cephas Barnard's threatening countenance, but another, gigantic with its vague outlines, which his fancy could not limit, confronting him with terrible negative power like a stone image.

He struck out against it, and the blows fell back on his own heart.
"What have I done ?" he demanded over and over of this great immovable and silent consciousness which he realized before him.