There was something strange and unfamiliar about the river to-night.

It had a voice, too, which allured and repelled him--a voice at the sound of which the grim despair within him stirred ominously at first, and then began slowly to rise up gaunt and terrible; began to move stealthily, but with ever-increasing swiftness through the deserted chambers of his heart.
No strong abiding principle was there to do battle with the enemy.

The minor feelings, sensibilities, emotions, amiable impulses, those courtiers of our prosperous days, had all forsaken him and fled.

Dare's house in his hour of need was left unto him desolate.
And the river spoke in a guilty whisper, which yet the quarrel of the wind and the trees could not drown, of deep places farther down, where the people were never found, people who--But there were shallows, too, he remembered, shallow places among the stones where the trout were.

If anybody were drowned, Dare thought, gazing down at the pale shifting moon in the water, he would be found there, perhaps, or at any rate, his hat--he took his hat off, and held it tightly clinched in both his hands--his hat would tell the tale..