He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's observing eyes, he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God.

And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers.

It was not so, at least, with him.

He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime.

He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitions terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful illegality of nature.