“What were your personal sensations while all this was taking place? How did you feel about it all?” asked Nick.
“That is one of the strangest features of the case, Mr. Carter,” replied Danton, “for while I seemed to know all about everything, as correctly as if I had seen the crime committed, it never once occurred to me that I was myself the guilty party. That aspect of the case was not impressed upon me till afterward.”
“When did it first occur to you?”
“Wait, and I will tell you. Through all that I did from the moment I discovered that Orizaba was dead until I began to put on my street clothes, I seem to have acted mechanically, as if I were really two beings, one of which was watching the other, passively. The finding of the wound on the back of his neck, the discovery of the open casket, the broken needle and the empty cork handle—none of those things seemed to surprise me at all, until I had begun the operation of dressing, and was in fact half-dressed, when it all came over me with a suddenness that made me stagger back against the wall like—well, as if I had received a blow in the face.”
“What came over you? What made you stagger?”
“The thought that perhaps I might have committed that horrible deed in my sleep.”
“No, sir! Disabuse your mind of any such thought as that, now and forever. You did not do murder in your sleep.”
“Well, I know that I did not do it at all, then.”
“Certainly you know that. Others do not and will not. But you may rest assured that no person on earth will ever believe that you did it in your sleep, and I least of all. And was that all that came over you and made you stagger back against the wall?”
“No; not all.”