m at home. This made him, in a gloomy murderous, mad way,
not only fearful FOR himself, but OF himself; for being, as it were, a
part of the room: a something supposed to be there, yet missing from it:
he invested himself with its mysterious terrors; and when he pictured in
his mind the ugly chamber, false and quiet, false and quiet, through the
dark hours of two nights; and the tumbled bed, and he not in it, though
believed to be; he became in a manner his own ghost and phantom, and was
at once the haunting spirit and the haunted man.

When the coach came up, which it soon did, he got a place outside and
was carried briskly onward towards home. Now, in taking his seat among
the people behind, who were chiefly country people, he conceived a fear
that they knew of the murder, and would tell him that the body had been
found; which, considering the time and place of the commission of the
crime, were events almost impossible to have happened yet, as he very
well knew. But although he did know it, and had therefore no reason
to regard their ignorance as anything but the natural sequence to
the facts, still this very ignorance of theirs encouraged him. So far
encouraged him, that he began to believe the body never would be found,
and began to speculate on that probability. Setting off from this point,
and measuring time by the rapid hurry of his guilty thoughts, and
what had gone before the bloodshed, and the troops of incoherent and
disordered images of which he was the constant prey; he came by
daylight to regard the murder as an old murder, and to think himself
comparatively safe because it had not been discovered yet. Yet! When the
sun which looked into the wood, and gilded with its rising light a dead
man's lace, had seen that man alive, and sought to win him to a thought
of Heaven, on its going down last night!

But here were London streets again. Hush!

It was but five o'clock. He had time enough to reach his own house
unobserved, and before there were many people in the streets, if nothing
had happened so far, tending to his discovery. He slipped down from
the coach without troubling the driver to stop his horses; and hurrying
across the road, and in and out of every by-way that lay near his
course, at length approached his own dwelling. He used additional
caution in his immediate neighbourhood; halting first to look all
down the street before him; then gliding swiftly through that one, and
stopping to survey the ne