, as if by some design and order of circumstances, the
knocking had come.
    It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had conjured
up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer and walked on again.
And having slunk about, in places unknown to him, all day; and being out at
night, in a lonely road, in an unusual dress, and in that wandering and
unsettled frame of mind; he stopped more than once to look about him, hoping he
might be in a dream.
    Still he was not sorry. No. He had hated the man too much, and had been
bent, too desperately and too long, on setting himself free. If the thing could
have come over again, he would have done it again. His malignant and revengeful
passions were not so easily laid. There was no more penitence or remorse within
him now, than there had been while the deed was brewing.
    Dread and fear were upon him. To an extent he had never counted on, and
could not manage in the least degree. He was so horribly afraid of that infernal
room 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
