Where I fed and slept during the days that followed I don't remember. I suppose I must have wandered mechanically to my lodging every night, and found my way to some tavern when my appetite prompted me to do so, without any governance or bidding of my brain. All that is clear to me is that I haunted the office, gleaning detail upon detail of the tragedy, hoping with a waning but desperate hope that somewhere there was an error, that all would come right at last. But from the first word I knew full well that all would not come right. Worthing was dead. He had been murdered. It was I myself who had murdered him. Still I refused to listen to the steady voice within me which day by day repeated so dully and so obstinately, "You have killed him, you have killed him." I fought against it, and sometimes shouted wildly to drown its insistent burden, or rushed away into the streets with my hands at my ears, till I wonder I wasn't arrested and locked up as a madman. But the truth had to be faced at last. With every fresh detail, as the news came slowly through, I felt the fearful reality of the thing closing about me like the grip of some slow, cruel animal gloating at my pain. At last I ceased to haunt the office. I knew all I was likely to know, and I would have given my life to have known nothing. Some papers were stuffed into my hands, I remember; for Worthing had been managing my affairs, and now I must find another to steer me through the legal maze. But just then my helplessness didn't trouble me. It was the dreadful knowledge that I had killed my friend which stung me like a stabbing dagger, goading me out of the heavy lethargy that might mercifully have numbed my feelings, and teasing me to a constant realization of the maddening truth. I didn't dare visit Jenny. Indeed I felt a horror at the thought of ever seeing her again. It was for her I had murdered Worthing. I didn't blame her; but somehow there seemed to me an unholy fate binding us together, and unless I could tear myself free even darker consequences would ensue. There was a bond of blood between us. To think of her even was to awaken a bitter cry in my heart, an echo as it were from another world of a reproach I couldn't bear. For Jenny was like a living monument of the evil I had done. With her image in my mind I was for ever whipped back to that night at Naples, forced to deal again that dreadful blow through knowing now whose life it was I was stabbing out of the world.