And so at last, out of all this torment of apprehension, out of the sleepless waitings and breathless listenings, had emerged a spectre, real and present in the end, to whose whispered hauntings I had long struggled to close my ears; whose approach I had sought to stay, beating my hands in air; whose name I had not dared to breathe to myself. And it was murder. Yes, murder. So only, and only so, was logically expounded that perverted creed of Nature. Livid, terrifying, his hands stained with blood, I saw him in its ghastly glair; saw him savagely wreaking on the social order the wrongs he had suffered at its hands; saw him reverted to the beast he worshipped, tearing his kind, a common robber and assassin. I will not say that I was convinced and overwhelmed in a breath. For long the hideous shadow of the phantom was poor proof against the sun of present love; would thin, attenuate to a mere gross mist in the light of kind embraces, and honest laughter, and a manly candour--on all, alas! but the subject that most corroded. Only when that later spectre of our estrangement crept between, did it assume a dreadful complexion, glooming through the other. And so, at last, the appalling confirmation. It had been for weeks a terror to me to creep by the secret passage into Portlock’s kitchen, on the rare occasions when my brief visits there, for the sake of some small change and play of liberty, were invited. For the hole entered close by the locked door, which had come to figure to me for the seal on all most nameless horrors; and I could not pass it by but with averted head, and nostrils held from breathing, and a sickness like to the death I felt it contained. Rather would I strain a little the chance of capture without; and often now, when George was sleeping--for he lay late after his night excursions--I would put the ladder to the hill, and climb, and wander in the hidden furrow above, sometimes as far as the gravel-pit, and there indulge my misery, daring even at the worst a thought of escape. For at length, so far as we knew, the chase of us had ceased altogether, and Portlock was no longer interrogated for possible information.