Finally he slunk around to the front door.
As he went he suddenly reflected upon his state of
mind in days gone by; if he could have known that
the time would come when he, Joseph Stebbins,
would feel culpable at approaching any front door!
He touched the electric bell and stood close to the
door, so that he might not be discovered from the
windows. Presently the door opened the length
of a chain, and a fair girlish head appeared. She
was one of the girls who had been terrified by him
in the woods, but that he did not know. Now again
her eyes dilated and her pretty mouth rounded!
She gave a little cry and slammed the door in his
face, and he heard excited voices. Then he saw two
pale, pretty faces, the faces of the two girls who had
come upon him in the wood, peering at him around
a corner of the lace in the bay-window, and he under-
stood what it meant -- that he was an object of ter-
ror to them. Directly he experienced such a sense
of mortal insult as he had never known, not even
when the law had taken hold of him. He held his
head high and went away, his very soul boiling with
a sort of shamed rage. "Those two girls are afraid
of me," he kept saying to himself. His knees shook
with the horror of it. This terror of him seemed the
hardest thing to bear in a hard life.
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