ped the pistol on the carpet.

And he fell back on his arm-chair, sobbing:

"I can't. I dare not! My God! My God! How can I have the courage to kill
myself?"

There was a knock at the door. He rose up in a stupefied condition. A
servant said:

"Monsieur's dinner is ready."

He replied:

"All right. I'm going down."

Then he picked up the revolver, locked it up again in the drawer, then
he looked at himself in the glass over the mantelpiece to see whether
his face did not look too much convulsed. It was as red as usual, a
little redder perhaps. That was all. He went down, and seated himself
before the table.

He ate slowly, like a man who wants to drag on the meal, who does not
want to be alone with himself.

Then he smoked several pipes in the hall while the plates were being
removed. After that, he went back to his room.

As soon as he was shut up in it, he looked under his bed, opened all his
cupboards, explored every corner, rummaged through all the furniture.
Then he lighted the tapers over the mantelpiece, and, turning round
several times, ran his eye all over the apartment with an anguish of
terror that made his face lose its color, for he knew well that he was
going to see her, as on every night--Little Louise Roque, the little
girl he had violated and afterwards strangled.

Every night the odious vision came back again. First, it sounded in his
ears like a kind of snorting such as is made by a threshing machine or
the distant passage of a train over a bridge. Then he commenced to pant,
to feel suffocated, and he had to unbutton his shirt-collar and his
belt. He moved about to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he
attempted to sing. It was in vain. His thoughts, in spite of himself,
went back to the day of the murder, and made him begin it all over again
in all its most secret details, with all the violent emotions he had
experienced from the first minute to the last.

He had felt on rising up that morning, the morning of the horrible day,
a little stupefaction and dizziness which he attributed to the heat, so
that he remained in his room till the time came for breakfast.

After the meal he had taken a siesta, then, towards the close of the
afternoon, he had gone out to breathe the fresh, soothing breeze under
the trees in the wood.

But, as soon as they were outside, the heavy, scorching air of the plain
oppressed him more. The sun, still high in the heavens, poured out on
the parched