His lantern, not yet extinguished, burned small and feeble in his hand.

Another night was breaking to another day; another and another would yet break, and all the desolation of a heart, the ruin of many hearts--what was it before Nature's unswerving and unalterable course! The phantasms of a night that had answered to his hallucinations were as nothing to the realities of a morning whose cruel light showed him only more plainly the blackness of his despair.
The sentiments of horror which now possessed him were more terrible because more spiritual than before.

To know no sepulture! The idea was horrible in itself, horrible in its association with an old Hebrew curse more remorseless than the curse of Cain, most horrible of all because to Ralph's heightened imagination it seemed to be a symbol--a symbol of retribution past and to come.
Yes, it was as he had thought, as he had half thought; God's hand was on him--on him of all others, and on others only through him.

Having once conceived this idea in its grim totality, having once fully received the impress of it from the violence and suddenness of a ghastly occurrence, Ralph seemed to watch with complete self-consciousness the action of the morbid fancy on his mind.

He traced it back to the moment when the truth (or what seemed to him the truth) touching the murder of Wilson had been flashed upon him by a look from Simeon Stagg.