"What is this?" he said. "What is all this? What is the meaning of all this? Blood!—blood! Is this blood upon my hands? No—no—yes, it is—it is. Ah! I recollect."
He held his blood-stained hands to his eyes for a few moments, and then as he withdrew them, he slowly turned his eyes to where the body lay. With a shudder he dragged himself along the floor further off from it, gasping out as he did so—
"Off—off, horrible object!—off—off!"
His distempered imagination, no doubt, pictured the body as following him. Is there not, indeed, a prompt retribution in this world?
"Off—off, I say! No further!—Not dead?—not dead yet? How much blood have you in you now to shed? Off—off!"
He reached the wall. He could get no further, and thus pursued still by the same wild insane idea, he sprung to his feet, and uttering a loud cry, he caught up a chair and held it out at arm's length before him, shouting—
"Keep away—keep away! Keep off, I say—I—I did not do it. Who shall say I did it? Who saw me do it?"
He slowly dropped the chair, and then in a more composed voice he said—
"Hush! hush! I am mad to raise these cries. They will alarm the court. I am mad—mad!"
Mrs. Oakley had hoped that his ravings would reach some other ears then hers, and that his apprehension, with the bleeding witness of his crime close at hand, would follow as a thing of course, and then how gladly would she have flown from her place of concealment, and cried out—