The sense of
some presence near, if not intrusive? God knows; all I can say is
that, drawn, by some other will than my own, I found my glance
travelling up the opposing bluff till at its top, framed between
the ragged wall and towering chimney of Spencer's Folly, I saw the
presence I had dreaded, the witness who was to undo me.
It was a woman--a woman with a little child in hand. I did not see
her face, for she was just on the point of turning away from the
dizzy verge, but nothing could have been plainer than the
silhouette which these two made against the flush of that early
evening sky. I see it yet in troubled dreams and desperate
musings. I shall see it always; for hard upon its view, fear
entered my soul, horrible, belittling fear, torturing me not with
a sense of guilt but of its consequences. I had slain a man to my
hurt, I a judge, just off the Bench; and soon ... possibly before
I should see Oliver again ... I should be branded from end to end
of the town with that name which had made such havoc in my mind
when I first saw Algernon Etheridge lying stark before me.
I longed to cry out--to voice my despair in the spot where my sin
had found me out; but my throat had closed, and the blood in my
veins ceased flowing. As long as I could catch a glimpse of this
woman's fluttering skirt as she retreated through the ruins, I
stood there, self-convicted, above the man I had slain, staring up
at that blotch of shining sky which was as the gate of hell to me.
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