for a
moment, which may never leave me. I shivered with cold that night, the
cold born of sheer physical terror. I knew that I was shut up in the
house with a soul bent on unreasoning vengeance, the soul of the animal
which I had killed prisoned in the body of the woman I had married. I
was sick with fear then. I am sick with fear now.

To-night I am so tired. My eyes are heavy and my head aches. No wonder.
I have not slept for three nights. I have not dared to sleep.

This strange revolution in my wife's conduct, this passionless
change--for I felt instinctively that warm humanity had nothing to do
with the transformation--took place three nights ago. These three last
days Mar-got has been playing a part. With what object?

When I sat down to this gray record of two souls--at once dreary and
fantastic as it would seem, perhaps, to many--I desired to reassure
myself, to write myself into sweet reason, into peace.

I have tried to accomplish the impossible. I feel that the wildest
theory may be the truest, after all--that on the borderland of what
seems madness, actuality paces.

Every remembrance of my mind confirms the truth first suggested to me by
Professor Black.

I know Margot's object now.

The soul of the creature that I tortured, that I killed, has passed into
the body of the woman whom I love; and that soul, which once slept in
its new cage, is awake now, watching, plotting perhaps. Unconsciously to
itself, it recognises me. It stares out upon me with eyes in which
the dull terror deepens to hate; but it does not understand why it
fears--why, in its fear, it hates. Intuition has taken the place of
memory. The Change of environment has killed recollection, and has left
instinct in its place.

Why did I ever sit down to write? The recalling of facts has set the
seal upon my despair.

Instinct only woke in Margot when I brought her to the place the soul
had known in the years when it looked out upon the world from the body
of an animal.

That first day on the terrace instinct stirred in its sleep, opened its
eyes, gazed forth upon me wonderingly, inquiringly.

Margot's faint remembrance of the terrace walk, of the flower-pots, of
the grass borders where the cat had often stretched itself in the sun,
her eagerness to see the chamber of death, her stealthy visits to that
chamber, her growing uneasiness, deepening to acute apprehension,
and finally to a deadly malignity--all lead me irresistibly to one