“My wife never came back:  naturally, sir—­for she was dead.”

He shifted a little on the boulders, slipped the snuff-box back into his waistcoat pocket, then crossing his legs and clasping his hands over one knee, bent forward and regarded me fixedly.

“I murdered her,” he said slowly, and nodded.

A pause followed that seemed to last an hour.  The stone which he had strapped in my mouth with his bandanna was giving me acute pain; it obstructed, too, what little breathing my emotion left me; and I dared not take my eyes off his.  The strain on my nerves grew so tense that I felt myself fainting when his voice recalled me.

“I wonder now,” he asked, as if it were a riddle—­“I wonder if you can guess why the body was never found?”

Again there was an intolerable silence before he went on.

“Lydia was a dear creature:  in many respects she made me an admirable wife.  Her affection for me was canine—­positively.  But she was fat, sir; her face a jelly, her shoulders mountainous.  Moreover, her voice!—­it was my cruciation—­monotonously, regularly, desperately voluble.  If she talked of archangels, they became insignificant—­and her themes, in ordinary, were of the pettiest.  Her waist, sir, and my arm had once been commensurate:  now not three of Homer’s heroes could embrace her.  Her voice could once touch my heart-strings into music; it brayed them now, between the millstones of the commonplace.  Figure to yourself a man of my sensibility condemned to live on these terms!”

He paused, tightened his grasp on his knee, and pursued.

“You remember, sir, the story of the baker in Langius?  He narrates that a certain woman conceived a violent desire to bite the naked shoulders of a baker who used to pass underneath her window with his wares.  So imperative did this longing become, that at length the woman appealed to her husband, who (being a good-natured man, and unwilling to disoblige her) hired the baker, for a certain price, to come and be bitten.  The man allowed her two bites, but denied a third, being unable to contain himself for pain.  The author goes on to relate that, for want of this third bite, she bore one dead child, and two living.  My own case,” continued the Reverend William, “was somewhat similar.  Lydia’s unrelieved babble reacted upon her bulk, and awoke in me an absorbing, fascinating desire to strike her.  I longed to see her quiver.  I fought against the feeling, stifled it, trod it down:  it awoke again.  It filled my thoughts, my dreams; it gnawed me like a vulture.  A hundred times while she sat complacently turning her inane periods, I had to hug my fist to my breast, lest it should leap out and strike her senseless.  Do I weary you?  Let me proceed:—­