ght of the knowledge of what he
had done, of that haunting reproach that he might have done it so much
better, and of the dread of discovery. This was load enough to crush
him, and he laboured under it day and night. It was as heavy on him in
his scanty sleep, as in his red-eyed waking hours. It bore him down with
a dread unchanging monotony, in which there was not a moment's variety.
The overweighted beast of burden, or the overweighted slave, can for
certain instants shift the physical load, and find some slight respite
even in enforcing additional pain upon such a set of muscles or such
a limb. Not even that poor mockery of relief could the wretched man
obtain, under the steady pressure of the infernal atmosphere into which
he had entered.

Time went by, and no visible suspicion dogged him; time went by, and
in such public accounts of the attack as were renewed at intervals,
he began to see Mr Lightwood (who acted as lawyer for the injured man)
straying further from the fact, going wider of the issue, and evidently
slackening in his zeal. By degrees, a glimmering of the cause of this
began to break on Bradley's sight. Then came the chance meeting with Mr
Milvey at the railway station (where he often lingered in his leisure
hours, as a place where any fresh news of his deed would be circulated,
or any placard referring to it would be posted), and then he saw in the
light what he had brought about.

For, then he saw that through his desperate attempt to separate those
two for ever, he had been made the means of uniting them. That he had
dipped his hands in blood, to mark himself a miserable fool and tool.
That Eugene Wrayburn, for his wife's sake, set him aside and left him to
crawl along his blasted course. He thought of Fate, or Providence, or
be the directing Power what it might, as having put a fraud upon
him--overreached him--and in his impotent mad rage bit, and tore, and
had his fit.

New assurance of the truth came upon him in the next few following days,
when it was put forth how the wounded man had been married on his bed,
and to whom, and how, though always in a dangerous condition, he was a
shade better. Bradley would far rather have been seized for his murder,
than he would have read that passage, knowing himself spared, and
knowing why.

But, not to be still further defrauded and overreached--which he would
be, if implicated by Riderhood, and punished by the law for his abject
failure, as though it h