ian himself believed that the sacrifice of Unorna, and of
himself afterwards, was to be an expiation of the outrage Unorna had put
upon his faith in his own person. He had merely seized upon the first
excuse which presented itself for ending all, because he was in reality
past hope.

We have, as yet, no absolute test of sanity, as we have of fever in the
body and of many other unnatural conditions of the human organism.
The only approximately accurate judgments in the patient's favour
are obtained from examinations into the relative consecutiveness and
consistency of thought in the individual examined, when the whole
tendency of that thought is towards an end conceivably approvable by a
majority of men. A great many philosophers and thinkers have accordingly
been pronounced insane at one period of history and have been held up
as models of sanity at another. The most immediately destructive
consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and
suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal
deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible
beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism.
It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is
more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was
under the first; it was undoubtedly least common under the second. In
other words it appears probable that the practice of considering certain
crimes as the result of insanity has a tendency to make those crimes
increase in number, as they undoubtedly increase in barbarity, from year
to year. Meanwhile, however, no definite conclusion has been reached as
to the state of mind of a man who murders the woman he loves and then
ends his own life.

Israel Kafka may therefore be regarded as mad or sane. In favour of the
theory of his madness the total uselessness of the deed he contemplated
may be adduced; on the other hand the extremely consecutive and
consistent nature of his thoughts and actions gives evidence of his
sanity.

When he found himself a prisoner in Unorna's conservatory, his intention
underwent no change though his body was broken with fatigue and his
nerves with the long continued strain of a terrible excitement. His
determination was as cool and as fixed as ever.

These somewhat dry reflections seem necessary to the understanding of
what followed.

The key turned in the lock and the bolt was slipped back. I