For some days after returning home, I could not get rid of the horrid gloom that brooded over me like a cloud of sulphurous vapor. During the day I kept myself very busy, looking after various things, making calls on those who needed a little assistance, looking after my garden and property, visiting Mr. Jasper, so my mind was diverted. But at night! I had to read the driest metaphysical books I possessed, not for pleasure or profit, but to fatigue my mind, so that it could get any rest at all. Woe to me, if it caught even the slightest thread of the black story of my life, for then away it would run like a fast flying reel, until all from the beginning was unwound. How I tossed and turned, trying to sleep! I repeated poem after poem, put wet cold towels around my head, arose and ran as fast as I could through the garden, and to concentrate my thoughts, repeated poems and paragraphs backward word by word. I thought of the fate of the damned, who through the long eternal night are trying to forget the foul offenses and crimes of their lives on earth! No, no hell to be compared to such a torment! To be their own accusers, to be their own judge, to keep forever their own infamous record! To be haunted by a ghost that will never be laid. Utter annihilation would be a paradise of bliss compared to such an eternal state of misery. I still had a duty to perform before I could drop the subject so far as it was possible to do so. M. Le Maistre had made me promise to let him know the result of my investigation, and of my visit to the Commissioner. It was no use to delay, as sooner or later I would have to tell him, and the black wounds would have to be re-opened again. I could not write to him, for I have made it a habit of my life never to write anything that I was not willing the whole world should know. I have gone a hundred miles to tell what I might have written in a few lines. There are so many chances for a paper to be lost and be found by the wrong person, to be mislaid or kept for years, to be read and gossiped about by the world after the writer is dead. These letters and writing of the Commissioner, some of them unsigned, had been his death warrant. So I had to go again to Lucknow. My old friend received me kindly, as usual. I went over the whole affair again, except that about my sister. That I never told except to the one himself most concerned. He heard it, and will remember it. My sister never even suspected what that man was to her. She had enough sorrow and shame as it was, without knowing of that black, foul crime. It was too much for me to know, and what would I have given to have erased the hideous remembrance of it from my memory?