Whether they caught him or not seemed, after all a little thing to me.

She was dead; that was the one all-absorbing, all-effacing fact that took possession of my mind, blotting out all minor matters that might be concerned with it.

Even the now assured fact that she had been poisoned was a thing that found little room in my consideration on that day of my burning grief.
She was dead, dead, dead! The hideous phrase boomed again and again through my distracted mind.

Compared with that overwhelming catastrophe, what signified to me the how or why or when she had died.

She was dead, and the world was empty.
For hours I sat on the rocks, alone by the sea, on that stormy day of December, and I indulged my grief where no prying eyes could witness it, amid the solitude of wild and angry Nature.