Thus ended the story of my marriage with Blanche Aleys.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
THE NEW WORLD
They were forever silent now, who, but a breath before, had been so full
of life and the stir of mortal passion; Deleroy dead beneath the cloak
upon the floor, Blanche dead in the oaken chair. We who remained alive
were silent also. I glanced at Kari's face; it was as that of a stone
statue on a tomb, only in it his large eyes shone, noting all things
and, as I imagined in my distraught fancy, filled with triumph and
foreknowledge. Considering it in that strange calm of the spirit which
sometimes supervenes on great and terrible events that for a while crush
its mortality from the soul and set it free to marvel at the temporal
pettiness of all we consider immediate and mighty, I wondered what was
the aspect of my own.
At the moment, I, who on this day had passed the portals of so many
emotions: that of the lover's longing for his bride won at last, only to
be lost again, that of acute and necessary business, that of the ancient
joy of battle and vengeance wreaked upon an evil man; that of the
unshuttering of my own eyes to the flame of a hellish truth, that of the
self-murder and turning to cold clay before those same eyes of her whom
I had hoped to clasp in honest love--I, I say, felt as though I, too,
were dead.
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