"I had to tell somebody. It was getting on my nerves. I suppose it gives you a kind of horror of me. Don't mind saying so if it does."
Bunning, taking out a grimy handkerchief, wiped his forehead. He shook his head without speaking.
Olva sat down in the chair opposite him and lit his pipe.
"I want to tell somebody all about it. You weren't really, I suppose, the best person to tell. You're a hysterical sort of fellow and you're easily frightened, but you happened to come in just when I was rather worked up about it. At any rate you've got to face it now and you must pull yourself together as well as you can. . . . Move away from the fire, if you're hot."
Bunning shook his head.
Olva continued: "I'm going to try to put it quite plainly to you, the Carfax part of it I mean. There are other things that have happened since that I needn't bother you with, but I'd like you to understand why I did it."
"Oh! my God!" said Bunning. He was trembling from head to foot and his fat hands rattled on the woodwork of the chair and his feet rattled on the floor.
"I met Carfax first at my private school—-a little, fat dirty boy he was then, and fat and dirty he's been ever since. I hated him, but I was always pleasant to him. He wasn't worth being angry with. He always did rotten things. He knew more filthy things than the other boys, and he was a bully—a beastly bully. I think he knew that I bated him, but we were on perfectly good terms. I think he was always a little afraid of me, but it's curious to remember that we never had a quarrel of any kind, until the day when I killed him."
Olva paused and asked Bunning to have a drink. Bunning, gazing at him with desperate eyes, shook his head.
"Then we went on to Rugby together. It's odd how Fate has apparently been determined to hammer out our paths side by side. Carfax grew more and more beastly. He always did the filthiest things and yet out of it all seemed to the world at large a perfectly decent fellow. He was clever in that way. I am not trying to defend myself. I'm making it perfectly straightforward and just as it really was. He knew that I knew him better than anybody, and as we went on at Rugby I think that his fear of me grew. I didn't hate him so much for being Carfax, but rather as standing for all sorts of rotten things. It didn't matter to me in the least whether he was a beast or not, I'm a beast myself, but it did matter that he should smile about it and have damp hands. When I touched his hand I always wanted to hit him.