 before
his slow and hesitating speech had formed those words.
    »It was you, villain,« said I.
    »I tell you it was your doing - I tell you it was done through you,« he
retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the vacant
air between us. »I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. I
giv' it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a limekiln as nigh her
as there is now nigh you, she shouldn't have come to life again. But it warn't
Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was favoured, and he was bullied and beat.
Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays
for it.«
    He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of the
bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly understood that
he was working himself up with its contents, to make an end of me. I knew that
every drop it held, was a drop of my life. I knew that when I was changed into a
part of the vapour that had crept towards me but a little while before, like my
own warning ghost, he would do as he had done in my sister's case - make all
haste to the town, and be seen slouching about there, drinking at the
ale-houses. My rapid mind pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street
with him in it, and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the
white vapour creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.
    It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years while
he said a dozen words, but that what he did say, presented pictures to me, and
not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain, I could not think
of a place without seeing it, or of persons without seeing them. It is
impossible to over-state the vividness of these images, and yet I was so intent,
all the time, upon him himself - who would not be intent on the tiger crouching
to spring! - that I knew of the slightest action of his fingers.
    When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which he sat,
and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and shading it with his
murderous hand
