Part Second Playing With Fire Chapter 6

Three days passed and Ethel had regained her health and spirits, but Fred Mostyn had not called since the wedding. Ruth thought some inquiry ought to be made, and Judge Rawdon called at the Holland House. There he was told that Mr. Mostyn had not been well, and the young man's countenance painfully confessed the same thing.

"My dear Fred, why did you not send us word you were ill?" asked the Judge.

"I had fever, sir, and I feared it might be typhoid. Nothing of the kind, however. I shall be all right in a day or two."

The truth was far from typhoid, and Fred knew it. He had left the wedding breakfast because he had reached the limit of his endurance. Words, stinging as whips, burned like hot coals in his mouth, and he felt that he could not restrain them much longer. Hastening to his hotel, he locked himself in his rooms, and passed the night in a frenzy of passion. The very remembrance of the bridegroom's confident transport put mur-der in his heart--murder which he could only practice by his wishes, impotent to compass their desires.

"I wish the fellow shot! I wish him hanged! I would kill him twenty times in twenty different ways! And Dora! Dora! Dora! What did she see in him? What could she see? Love her? He knows nothing of love--such love as tortures me." Backwards and forwards he paced the floor to such imprecations and ejaculations as welled up from the whirlpool of rage in his heart, hour following hour, till in the blackness of his misery he could no longer speak. His brain had become stupefied by the iteration of inevitable loss, and so refused any longer to voice a woe beyond remedy. Then he stood still and called will and reason to council him. "This way madness lies," he thought. "I must be quiet--I must sleep--I must forget."