But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented itself to him on the instant--a little heart within the heart--a poor decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child. He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in heaven! it _was_ a child--not sleeping, but dead and mummified! A sound--something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been winded by a blow--fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it, staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing--gazing, but at him no longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had shuddered from her cheeks. Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily expressed terror of her neighbourhood. “I did not kill him,” she whispered. “It _is_ Baptiste, then?” He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something namelessly hideous. Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him, imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and believe her. “Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill him!”