The Voice of the People by Ellen Glasgow

When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and he saw red like a man who kills.

Passing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do murder -- murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the injustice that he resented with a holy rage -- the hideous fact that a clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he merited.