diot's; guilt and terror
had made her hideous to look upon already.

I drew her onward a few paces towards the Square. Then I stopped,
remembering the body that lay face downwards on the road. The savage
strength of a few moments before, had left me from the time when I first
saw her. I now reeled where I stood, from sheer physical weakness.
The sound of her pantings and shudderings, of her abject inarticulate
murmurings for mercy, struck me with a supernatural terror. My fingers
trembled round her arm, the perspiration dripped down my face, like
rain; I caught at the railings by my side, to keep myself from falling.
As I did so, she snatched her arm from my grasp, as easily as if I had
been a child; and, with a cry for help, fled towards the further end of
the street.

Still, the strange instinct of never losing hold of her, influenced me.
I followed, staggering like a drunken man. In a moment, she was out of
my reach; in another, out of my sight. I went on, nevertheless; on, and
on, and on, I knew not whither. I lost all ideas of time and distance.
Sometimes I went round and round the same streets, over and over again.
Sometimes I hurried in one direction, straight forward. Wherever I went,
it seemed to me that she was still just before; that her track and my
track were one; that I had just lost my hold of her, and that she was
just starting on her flight.

I remember passing two men in this way, in some great thoroughfare. They
both stopped, turned, and walked a few steps after me. One laughed at
me, as a drunkard. The other, in serious tones, told him to be silent;
for I was not drunk, but mad--he had seen my face as I passed under a
gas-lamp, and he knew that I was mad.

"MAD!"--that word, as I heard it, rang after me like a voice of
judgment. "MAD!"--a fear had come over me, which, in all its frightful
complication, was expressed by that one word--a fear which, to the man
who suffers it, is worse even than the fear of death; which no human
language ever has conveyed, or ever will convey, in all its horrible
reality, to others. I had pressed onward, hitherto, because I saw a
vision that led me after it--a beckoning shadow, ahead, darker even
than the night darkness. I still pressed on, now; but only because I was
afraid to stop.

I know not how far I had gone, when my strength utterly failed me, and
I sank down helpless, in a lonely place where the houses were few and
scattered, and trees and fields were diml