‘Taking them in my hand, I crossed the road, and got round behind the inn, where the couch heap was still smouldering. Keeping behind the hedge, I could see the heads of the three or four men who watched the spot. ‘Standing in this place I took the bones, and threw them one by one over the hedge and over the men’s heads into the smoking embers. When the bones had all been thrown, I threw the keys; last of all I threw the watch. ‘I then returned home as I had gone, and went to bed once more, just as the dawn began to break. I exulted--“Cytherea is mine again!” ‘At breakfast-time I thought, “Suppose the cupboard should by some unlikely chance get moved to-day!” ‘I went to the mason’s yard hard by, while the men were at breakfast, and brought away a shovelful of mortar. I took it into the outhouse, again shifted the cupboard, and plastered over the mouth of the oven behind. Simply pushing the cupboard back into its place, I waited for the next night that I might bury the body, though upon the whole it was in a tolerably safe hiding-place. ‘When the night came, my nerves were in some way weaker than they had been on the previous night. I felt reluctant to touch the body. I went to the outhouse, but instead of opening the oven, I firmly drove in the shoulder-nails that held the cupboard to the wall. “I will bury her to-morrow night, however,” I thought. ‘But the next night I was still more reluctant to touch her. And my reluctance increased, and there the body remained. The oven was, after all, never likely to be opened in my time. ‘I married Cytherea Graye, and never did a bridegroom leave the church with a heart more full of love and happiness, and a brain more fixed on good intentions, than I did on that morning. ‘When Cytherea’s brother made his appearance at the hotel in Southampton, bearing his strange evidence of the porter’s disclosure, I was staggered beyond expression. I thought they had found the body. “Am I to be apprehended and to lose her even now?” I mourned. I saw my error, and instantly saw, too, that I must act externally like an honourable man. So at his request I yielded her up to him, and meditated on several schemes for enabling me to claim the woman I had a legal right to claim as my wife, without disclosing the reason why I knew myself to have it. ‘I went home to Knapwater the next day, and for nearly a week lived in a state of indecision. I could not hit upon a scheme for proving my wife dead without compromising myself. ‘Mr. Raunham hinted that I should take steps to discover her whereabouts by advertising. I had no energy for the farce. But one evening I chanced to enter the Rising Sun Inn. Two notorious poachers were sitting in the settle, which screened my entrance. They were half drunk--their conversation was carried on in the solemn and emphatic tone common to that stage of intoxication, and I myself was the subject of it.