With a sudden movement I snatched the revolver from my pocket:  she did not move, except her white lips, which, I think, whispered: 

‘Not yet....’

I stood with hanging arm, forefinger on trigger, looking at her.  I saw her glance once at the weapon, and then she fixed her eyes upwards upon my face:  and now that same smile, which had disappeared, was on her lips again, meaning confidence, meaning disdain.

I waited for her to open her mouth to say something—­to stop that smile—­that I might shoot her quick and sudden:  and she would not, knowing that I could not kill her while she was smiling; and suddenly, all my pity and love for her changed into a strange resentment and rage against her, for she was purposely making hard for me what I was doing for her sake:  and the bitter thought was in my mind:  ’You are nothing to me:  if you want to die, you do your own killing; and I will do my own killing.’  And without one word to her, I strode away, and left her there.

I see now that this whole drawing of lots was nothing more than a farce:  I never could have killed her, smiling, or no smiling:  for to each thing and man is given a certain strength:  and a thing cannot be stronger than its strength, strive as it may:  it is so strong, and no stronger, and there is an end of the matter.

I walked up to the Grand Bailli’s bureau, a room about twenty-five feet from the ground.  By this time it was getting pretty dark, but I could see, by peering, the face of a grandfather’s-clock which I had long since set going, and kept wound.  It is on the north side of the room, over the writing-desk opposite the oriels.  It then pointed to half-past six, and in order to fix some definite moment for the bitter effort of the mortal act, I said:  ‘At Seven.’  I then locked the door which opens upon three little steps near the desk, and also the stair-door; and I began to pace the chamber.  There was not a breath of air here, and I was hot; I seemed to be stifling, tore open my shirt at the throat, and opened the lower half of the central mullion-space of one oriel.  Some minutes later, at twenty-five to seven, I lit two candles on the desk, and sat to write to her, the pistol at my right hand; but I had hardly begun, when I thought that I heard a sound at the three-step door, which was only four feet to my left:  a sound which resembled a scraping of her slipper; I stole to the door, and crouched, listening:  but I could hear nothing further.  I then returned to the desk, and set to writing, giving her some last directions for her life, telling her why I died, how I loved her, much better than my own soul, begging her to love me always, and to live on to please me, but if she would die, then to be sure to die near me.  Tears were pouring down my face, when, turning, I saw her standing in a terrified pose hardly two feet behind me.  The absolute stealth which had brought and put her there, unknown to me, was like miracle:  for the ladder, whose top I saw intruding into the open oriel, I knew well, having often seen it in a room below, and its length was quite thirty feet, nor could its weight be trifling:  yet I had heard not one hint of its impact upon the window.  But there, at all events, she was, wan as a ghost.