Then, when there should remain no one to be distressed and degraded by his crime, then he would discharge his hardened conscience of the intolerable load it bore, and give himself up to justice, to be dealt with according to law. Not until then could he hope for peace. At last he succeeded in marking out his future external life with sufficient clearness of outline, but his internal life was strangely distracted and confused. He felt himself to be “a sinner above all sinners,” and at the same time the irresponsible victim of a chain of circumstances, the work of irresistible destiny. So deep was his mental abstraction from all surrounding things and movements, that he knew not when the man at the wheel or the watch on deck was relieved until a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a kindly voice said: “Young gentleman, you are looking very ill. Hadn’t you better go below and turn in?” It was the early morning watch who spoke to him, and he answered wearily: “I thank you. Yes, I think I will.” And he rose slowly and went to his stateroom, and threw himself into the lower berth. For some time he lay awake there, intently thinking, intensely suffering, but with thought and emotion revolving still in the same circle around the tragedy—the destiny of his life. At length the body could bear no more, but succumbed to the exhaustion of many nights’ vigilance, and he sank into sleep, which was at first a fitful doze and afterward a profound slumber, which lasted until noon the next day, when he awoke to find the boat at Richmond. Oh, that awakening! Oh, the agony of returning to life, to memory and to misery, and to the revolving of thought and feeling around the destined tragedy! Living it all over again, as if he were sentenced to do so until death! Without arranging his disordered hair or dress, he went up on deck, looking so wild and haggard that one of the deck hands remarked to another: “That young fellow has been on a big drunk, and is paying for it now, you bet.” Harcourt had no intention of stopping in Richmond. He was too well known in the Queen City of the South. He would go to the North, and lose his identity in some large town where he had never been before. New York City offered the largest human wilderness in which to lose himself. He had never been there in his life, and had no acquaintances there except the Bushes and that Belial, Hanson. Hanson was away, and the Bushes would not be at all likely to discover him in changed identity. He would go to New York by the first boat. He declined the breakfast offered him by the steward, gathered his baggage and had it transferred to the New York boat, which was getting up steam to start on her northward voyage. He sat on the deck, staring off into vacancy, as the boat turned and steamed down the river. “Young fellow getting over a long spree, I shouldn’t wonder,” remarked one passenger to another, as they noticed the pallid skin, haggard features and inflamed eyes of poor Harcourt.