Neither of them dreamed that Barnabas watched them, standing in one
of the front rooms of his new house. He had gone in there when he
fled from Cephas Barnard's, and had not yet been home. He recognized
Charlotte's motions as quickly as her face, and knew Sylvia's voice,
although he could not distinguish what she said. He watched them turn
the corner of the other road, and thought that Charlotte was going to
spend the night with her aunt--he did not dream why. He had resolved
to stay where he was in his desolate new house, and not go home
himself.
A great grief and resentment against the whole world and life itself
swelled high within him. It was as if he lost sight of individual
antagonists, and burned to dash life itself in the face because he
existed. 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.
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