the punt both quickly and easily.

The quiet, and the gloom, and the dropping rain, strangely affected him
now, as he plied his punt-pole; once he could have wept in his remorse,
and another time he almost shrieked in fear. How lonesome it seemed! how
dreadful! and that death-dyed face behind him--ha! woman, away I say!
But he neared the island, and, all shoeless as he was, crept up its
muddy bank.

"Hallo! nybor, who be you a-poaching on my manor, eh? that bean't good
manners, any how."

Ben Burke has told us all the rest.

But, when Burke had got his spoils--when the biter had been bitten--the
robber robbed--the murderer stripped of his murdered victim's
money--when the bereaved miscreant, sullenly returning in the dark,
damp night, tracked again the way he came upon that lonely lake--no one
yet has told us, none can rightly tell, the feelings which oppressed
that God-forsaken man. He seemed to feel himself even a sponge which,
the evil one had bloated with his breath, had soaked it then in blood,
had squeezed it dry again, and flung away! He was Satan's broken tool--a
weed pulled up by the roots, and tossed upon the fire; alone--alone in
all the universe, without countenance or sympathy from God, or man, or
devil; he yearned to find, were it but a fiend to back him, but in vain;
they held aloof, he could see them vaguely through the gloom--he could
hear them mocking him aloud among the patter of the rain-drops--ha! ha!
ha--the pilfered fool!

Bitterly did he rue his crime--fearfully he thought upon its near
discovery--madly did he beat his miserable breast, to find that he had
been baulked of his reward, yet spent his soul to earn it.

Oh--when the house-dog bayed at him returning, how he wished he was that
dog! he went to him, speaking kindly to him, for he envied that
dog--"Good dog--good dog!"

But more than envy kept him lingering there: the wretched man did it for
delay--yes, though morn was breaking on the hills--one more--one more
moment of most precious time.

CHAPTER XXX.

SECOND THOUGHTS.

FOR--again he must go through that room!

No other entrance is open--not a window, not a door: all close as a
prison: and only by the way he went, by the same must he return.

He trembled all over, as a palsied man, when he touched the lock: with
stiffening hair, and staring eyes, he peeped in at that well-remembered
chamber: he entered--and crept close up to the corpse, stealthily and
dreadingly-