But this dreadful discovery--this dark, strange confession, fell upon her just at the time when it could have the effect of darkening as with the shadow of both crime and death the whole of her life. It seemed a stroke of fate so malignant, so merciless, so far-reaching, so unutterably terrible.
Reynolds suffered, but not as she did. He was gloomy, impatient, restless, but his wound continued to heal rapidly and his bodily strength hourly increased. His physical constitution was so elastic and vigorous that nothing, it seemed, could long disturb its equilibrium. Mentally, however, he was a man of extremes, surging to the furthest stretch of the tether in whatever direction impelled. Now he was in the deepest pit of despondency. The whole light of life had gone out.
As if to render his state more dreary by contrast, the weather waxed with sudden fervor into all the golden splendor of a semi-tropical spring. A sprinkling of pale green tassels and tender leaflets appeared on certain deciduous trees, and the grasses peculiar to the region began to shoot up bright spikes in the warmer spots of the brown fallow fields. A dainty woody odor pervaded the air and the mocking birds and brown thrushes sang gayly in the old trees about the mansion. The sky assumed a hue of such rich, tender azure as is observed nowhere save in the low country in especially favorable weather. And the river (what stream is more beautiful than the Alabama?) seemed to go by with some rhythmic impulse but half repressed in its broad, almost silent current.
Left much alone during these days, Reynolds naturally enough indulged in retrospection; but his thoughts rarely went further back than to that tragedy in the far West which had let fall upon his life the almost insufferable shadow--a shadow rendered doubly dense by its effect upon his present prospects. Often his gloomy reflections stopped at the mountain cabin and lingered with its inmates. The face and form of Milly White, once so meaningless to him, were rapidly assuming a significance that would not be ignored. Even his deep passion for Agnes Ransom and the brooding dread of its hopelessness now, could not shut away the accusing, vaguely insistent eyes of the little mountain girl. The isolation of that lonely plantation house gave him no sense of separation from the sources of his trouble.