She came towards him, as she had come on the day of the crime
towards the murderer. And the man recoiled before the apparition--he
retreated to his bed and sank down upon it, knowing well that the little
one had entered the room, and that she now was standing behind the
curtain which presently moved. And until daybreak, he kept staring at
this curtain, with a fixed glance, ever waiting to see his victim
depart.

But she did not show herself any more; she remained there behind the
curtain which quivered tremulously now and then.

And Renardet, his fingers clinging to the bedclothes, squeezed them as
he had squeezed the throat of little Louise Roque.

He heard the clock striking the hours; and in the stillness the pendulum
kept ticking in time with the loud beatings of his heart. And he
suffered, the wretched man, more than any man had ever suffered before.

Then, as soon as a white streak of light on the ceiling announced the
approaching day, he felt himself free, alone, at last, alone in his
room; and at last he went to sleep. He slept then some hours--a
restless, feverish sleep in which he retraced in dreams the horrible
vision of the night just past.

When, later on, he went down to breakfast, he felt doubled up as if
after prodigious fatigues; and he scarcely ate anything, still haunted
as he was by the fear of what he had seen the night before.

He knew well, however, that it was not an apparition, that the dead do
not come back, and that his sick soul, his soul possessed by one thought
alone, by an indelible remembrance, was the only cause of his
punishment, the only evoker of the dead girl brought back by it to life,
called up by it and raised by it before his eyes in which the
ineffaceable image remained imprinted. But he knew, too, that he could
not cure it, that he would never escape from the savage persecution of
his memory; and he resolved to die, rather than to endure these tortures
any longer.

Then, he thought of how he would kill himself. He wished for something
simple and natural, which would preclude the idea of suicide. For he
clung to his reputation, to the names bequeathed to him by his
ancestors; and if there were any suspicion as the cause of his death,
people's thoughts might be perhaps directed towards the mysterious
crime, towards the murderer who could not be found, and they would not
hesitate to accuse him of the crime.

A strange idea came into his head, that of getting himself crus