The thought of his own strength, helpless before her weakness, maddened him. Houses, lands, money, had become passively obedient to the power of his will. He controlled these things, did with them as he pleased, in effect an overlord, haughty, unbending, merciless; but this one thing which he had put out his hand to take—carelessly, as one will pluck a ripe apple from the bough at the languid prompting of appetite—this girl, who had for years been no more to him than the birds hopping in the trees outside his window, how and by what means had she suddenly contrived to gain this monstrous ascendency over him? What uncanny power in those clear gray eyes of hers had metamorphosed Stephen Jarvis, cool, middle-aged man of affairs, into the weak creature he had always despised in his saner moments?
During these days of inward tumult he carried on the dull routine of his business, forcing himself to the task with all the powers of a will suddenly turned traitor to its master. In spite of himself he seemed to see her there in his lonely house over against the sombre rows of books, her face vividly alive, defiantly youthful. Despite his resolves she perpetually came between him and the printed page which he strove to read; worst of all, she haunted his restless slumbers by night, now pleading with him; now defying him; mocking him with elfin laughter, as she fled before him, the child in her arms; while he pursued leaden-footed through uncounted miles of shadowy country.
The two did not meet face to face, while the rains and chilling winds of April gradually spent themselves, and the grass, illumined with a thousand cheerful sunbursts of dandelions, grew long under the blossoming trees. The mated birds sang only at dawn now, being too busy with the rapturous labors of nest-building to pause for vocal expression of their gladness. In the fields staid farm-horses indulged in unwonted gambols and nosed their mates with little whinnying cries; grazing cattle lifted their heads from the sweet springing grass to gaze with large wistful eyes at the widespread landscape. Once, long ago, they had roamed the unfenced pastures of the world in May, herded cows and yearlings, and the lordly bulls leading on, while the urge and rapture of the returning sun brooded the earth, compelling it to bring forth after its kind. Though she did not see him, yet none the less Jarvis obtruded his harsh visage into Barbara’s thoughts by day and by night. Nor could a wiser man than Jarvis have guessed that the girl was literally enfolded in cloudy thought forms, projected toward her from his own brain, with all the accuracy and certainty of an electric current traversing the viewless paths of air between wireless stations. That we do not understand these phenomena with any degree of accuracy does not render them the less effective.