him elsewhere at the last moment, or
the energies and activities that had gone to pile this accumulation were
all spent in the process and now he did not need them.

Then she looked further, to the extremity of the den he had made, and
there, lying comfortably on a pile of shavings, Estelle found him.

She guessed that the storm and stress of his crime had exhausted him and
thrown him into heaviest possible physical slumber after great mental
tribulation. She shuddered as she looked down on him and a revulsion, a
loathing tempted her to creep away again before he awakened. She did not
think of him as a patricide, nor did her own loss entirely inspire the
emotion; she never associated him with that, but kept him outside it, as
she would have kept some insensible or inanimate object had such been
responsible for Ironsyde's end. It was the sudden thought of all
Raymond's death might mean--not to her but the world--that turned her
heart to stone for a fearful second as she looked down upon the
unconscious figure. Her own sorrow was sealed at its fountains for the
time. But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed. And then came
the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little
while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world
also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not
melt then, it grew softer.

But there was more to learn before she left him and the truth can be
recorded.

Abel had killed his father and hastened to his lair exultant. He had
provided for what should follow and vaguely hoped that presently, before
his stores were spent, the way would be clearer for escape. He assured
himself safe from discovery and guessed that when a fortnight was
passed, he might safely creep out, reach a port, find work in a ship and
turn his back upon England for ever.

That was his general plan before the deed. Afterwards all changed for
him. He then found himself a being racked and over-mastered by new
sensations. The desirable thing that he had done changed its features,
even as death changes the features of life; the ideal, so noble and
seemly before, when attained assumed such a shape as, in one of Abel's
heredity, it was bound to assume. Not at once did the change appear, but
as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the clear, triumphant sky of
his achievement. Even so an apple, that once he had stolen and hidden,
was bruised unknown to him and thus cont