ur
steps I had been resting on. The door was our door.

"All my doubts and all my struggles dropped out of my mind when I made
that discovery. There was no mistaking what this perpetual coming back
to the house meant. Resist it as I might, it was to be.

"I opened the street door and went up stairs, and heard him sleeping his
heavy sleep, exactly as I had heard him when I went out. I sat down on
my bed and took off my bonnet, quite quiet in myself, because I knew it
was to be. I damped the towel, and put it ready, and took a turn in the
room.

"It was just the dawn of day. The sparrows were chirping among the trees
in the square hard by.

"I drew up my blind; the faint light spoke to me as if in words, 'Do it
now, before I get brighter, and show too much.'

"I listened. The friendly silence had a word for me too: 'Do it now, and
trust the secret to Me.'

"I waited till the church clock chimed before striking the hour. At the
first stroke--without touching the lock of his door, without setting
foot in his room--I had the towel over his face. Before the last stroke
he had ceased struggling. When the hum of the bell through the morning
silence was still and dead, _he_ was still and dead with it."

11.

"The rest of this history is counted in my mind by four days--Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday. After that it all fades off like, and the
new years come with a strange look, being the years of a new life.

"What about the old life first? What did I feel, in the horrid quiet of
the morning, when I had done it?

"I don't know what I felt. I can't remember it, or I can't tell it, I
don't know which. I can write the history of the four days, and that's
all.

"Wednesday.--I gave the alarm toward noon. Hours before, I had put
things straight and fit to be seen. I had only to call for help, and to
leave the people to do as they pleased. The neighbors came in, and then
the police. They knocked, uselessly, at his door. Then they broke it
open, and found him dead in his bed.

"Not the ghost of a suspicion of me entered the mind of any one. There
was no fear of human justice finding me out: my one unutterable dread
was dread of an Avenging Providence.

"I had a short sleep that night, and a dream, in which I did the deed
over again. For a time my mind was busy with thoughts of confessing
to the police, and of giving myself up. If I had not belonged to a
respectable family, I should have done it. From generation to