CHAPTER X
A COWARD SOUL
FATE plays grim tricks sometimes; and acts performed of seemingly little consequence at the moment may be but the first unconscious step, from which, once taken, there is no turning back, that leads irrevocably, and ever deeper, into that darkest maze of life's tragedy where all is confusion and panic and from which there is no egress—save one.
Harold Merton had not left Berley Falls after the trial. Associations that he did not care to face in New York, together with his mother's persuasions, had led him to decide, for the time being at least, to remain where he was. The doctor's estate brought to his mother a sufficient, if modest, competence, which, too, was no small factor in his determination; so, with an eye to public opinion, he announced his intention of practising his profession—that of law—in his home town.
Following the trial, his first feelings had been ones of relief; relief so great that the revulsion was like a deathly weakness, the swooning horror of one snatched from the edge of a precipice upon which he had stumbled. Then came fear. And thereafter upon the coward soul, as the shuttle in its guides, fixed, undeviable, moves backward and forward, came relief and fear, relief and fear, forward and backward—relief and fear.
Gratitude toward Varge he had; but it was a strange
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