Next moment the earth seemed too narrow, the heavens too contracted for my misery.  That he was dead—­that my blow had killed him, I never doubted for an instant.  I knew it, as we know the face of Doom when once it has risen upon us.  Never, never again would this lump of clay, which a few minutes before had filled the Hollow with shrillest whistling, breathe or think or speak.  He was dead, dead, dead!—­And I?  What was I?

The name which no man hears unmoved, no amount of repetition makes easy to the tongue or welcome to the ear! ... the name which I had heard launched in full forensic eloquence so many times in accusation against the wretches I had hardly regarded as being in the same human class as myself, rang in my ear as though intoned from the very mouth of hell.  I could not escape it.  I should never be able to escape it again.  Though I was standing in a familiar scene—­a scene I had known and frequented from childhood, I felt myself as isolated from my past and as completely set apart from my fellows as the shipwrecked mariner tossed to precarious foot-hold on his wave-dashed rock.  I forgot that other criminals existed.  In that one awful moment I was in my own eyes the only blot upon the universe—­the sole inhabitant of the new world into which I had plunged—­the world of crime—­the world upon which I had sat in judgment before I knew—­

What broke the spell?  A noise?  No, I heard no noise.  The sense of some presence near, if not intrusive?  God knows; all I can say is that, drawn, by some other will than my own, I found my glance travelling up the opposing bluff till at its top, framed between the ragged wall and towering chimney of Spencer’s Folly, I saw the presence I had dreaded, the witness who was to undo me.

It was a woman—­a woman with a little child in hand.  I did not see her face, for she was just on the point of turning away from the dizzy verge, but nothing could have been plainer than the silhouette which these two made against the flush of that early evening sky.  I see it yet in troubled dreams and desperate musings.  I shall see it always; for hard upon its view, fear entered my soul, horrible, belittling fear, torturing me not with a sense of guilt but of its consequences.  I had slain a man to my hurt, I a judge, just off the Bench; and soon ... possibly before I should see Oliver again ...  I should be branded from end to end of the town with that name which had made such havoc in my mind when I first saw Algernon Etheridge lying stark before me.

I longed to cry out—­to voice my despair in the spot where my sin had found me out; but my throat had closed, and the blood in my veins ceased flowing.  As long as I could catch a glimpse of this woman’s fluttering skirt as she retreated through the ruins, I stood there, self-convicted, above the man I had slain, staring up at that blotch of shining sky which was as the gate of hell to me.  Not till their two figures had disappeared and it was quite clear again did the instinct of self-preservation return, and with it the thought of flight.