I think that at midnight, or thereabouts, I must have fallen asleep.
When I awoke the candle was out, and the fire was out. The room was in perfect darkness. I laid my hand upon my cousin's forehead. He was cold and dead.
Then I heard the voice of the watchman in the street: 'Past two o'clock, and a frosty morning!'
The voice I had heard before whispered again in my ear.
'Alice is free—Alice is free! Thou—thou—thou alone hast set her free! Thou hast killed her husband!'
I threw myself upon my knees and spent the rest of that long night in seeking for repentance; but then, as now, the lamentation of a sinner is also mingled with the joy of thinking that Alice was free at last, and by none other hand than mine.
This I repeat is my confession: I might have saved my cousin, and I suffered him to die. Wherefore I have left the profession in which it was my ambition to distinguish myself, and am no longer anything but a poor and obscure person, living on the charity of my friends in a remote village.
Two days afterwards I was sitting at the table, looking through the dead man's papers, when I heard a footstep on the stair.
It was Barnaby, who broke noisily into the room.