“I’ll give his message—yes, I’ll give your message.”
And he thought what possessed him to come out without his hat, and he looked whiter than ever.
And then he thought, “What brought him there?”
And then, “What was his message?”
Again a shock, a chasm—his brain had mocked him.
Dreadful when that potent servant begins to mutiny, and instead of honest work for its master finds pastime for itself in fearful sport.
“My God! what am I thinking of?” he said, with a kind of chill, looking back over his shoulder.
His tired horse was plucking a mouthful of grass that grew at the foot of a tree.
“We are both used up,” he said, letting his horse, at a quicker pace, pursue its homeward path. “Poor fellow, you are tired as well as I. I’ll be all right, I dare say, in the morning if I could only sleep. Something wrong—something a little wrong—that sleep will cure—all right to-morrow.”
He looked up as he passed toward the windows of his and Alice’s room. When he was out a piece of the shutter was always open. But if so to-night there was no light in the room, and with a shock and a dreadful imperfection of recollection, the scene which occurred on the night past returned.