He woke up from his crime, as one wakes out of a nightmare. The child burst out weeping.
He said:
"Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue! I'll give you money."
But she did not hear him, she went on sobbing.
He went on:
"Come now, hold your tongue! Do hold your tongue. Keep quiet."
She still kept shrieking, writhing in the effort to get away from him. He suddenly realized that he was ruined, and he caught her by the neck to stop her mouth from uttering these heartrending, dreadful screams. As she continued to struggle with the desperate strength of a being who is seeking to fly from death, he pressed his enormous hands on the little throat swollen with cries, and in a few seconds he had strangled her so furiously did he grip her, without intending to kill her but only to make her keep silent.
Then he rose up overwhelmed with horror.
She lay before him with her face bleeding and blackened. He was going to rush away when there sprang up in his agitated soul the mysterious and undefined instinct that guides all beings in the hour of danger.
It was necessary to throw the body into the water; but another impulse drove him towards the clothes, of which he made a thin parcel. Then as he had a piece of twine in his pocket, he tied it up and hid it in a deep portion of the stream, under the trunk of a tree, the foot of which was steeped in the Brindelle.