If I meet her in the dark, her green eyes glare at me. I try to win her over to my side in a covert manner by stroking her coat; but as I smooth her fur skilfully and cunningly, I am convinced that she arches her back in a manner more significant than usual, and that by that action she declines to be a passive accessory to the fact. Her very tail, as it curls beneath my fingers, accuses me. But time goes on, and I am not arrested and led away to be hanged. When my baby-brother is in his coffin I am taken to see him. The cat follows at my heels; I strive to push her away stealthily with my foot, but she rubs her ear against my leg, and will not leave me. I do not see my baby-brother, because I shut my eyes, and I sob and tremble so that they are compelled to take me out of the room; but I have a vague remembrance of flowers about his coffin. I am a little relieved when I hear that he is buried, but the night that follows is a night of torture to me. The Dutch clock ticks, 'I know! I know!' and the cat purrs, 'I know! I know!' and when I am in bed the shade of Jane Painter steals into the room, and after smelling about for blood, whispers in a ghastly undertone that _she_ knows, and is going to tell. Of the doctor, also, I begin to be frightened, for after his visit to my father's sick-room, my mother brings him to see me--being anxious about me, I hear her say. He stops and speaks to me, and when his fingers are on my wrist, I fancy that the beating of my pulse is revealing my crime to him. But more weighty cares even than mine are stirring in our house, and making themselves felt. My father's last moments are approaching, and I hear that he cannot last the day out. He lasts the day out, but he does not last the night out. As the friend of the family, Snaggletooth remains in the house to see the end of his old comrade. He and my father were schoolboys together, he tells me. 'He was the cleverest boy in the school,' Snaggletooth says; 'the cleverest boy in the school! He used to do my sums for me. We went out birds'-nesting together; and many and many's the time we've stood up against the whole school, snowballing. A snowball, with a stone in it, hit him in the face once, and knocked him flat down; but he was up in a minute, all bloody, and rushed into the middle of our enemies, like a young lion--like a young lion! He was the first and the cleverest of all of us--I was a long way behind him. And now, think of him lying there almost at his last breath, and look at me!' Snaggletooth straightens himself as he walks upstairs, murmuring, 'The cleverest boy in the school! And now think of him, and look at me!'