When Horace returned to Harliflax it was night--too late even for an accepted lover to gain admittance to the widowed house of Mrs. Stenhouse, and Horace was not even an openly accepted lover. These ten days had changed him greatly. This monstrous crime had indeed germinated in his mind from the very hour of his return from London; but that passion of temptation was very different from the horror of unbearable suspense and anxiety which consumed him now. While he was still only about to do it, his mind was buoyed up by a hideous fascination, which carried him over time and space as though upon a devil's wings. Now that he had done it, every hour was a staring, wide-eyed Medusa, watching and petrifying; and still, through the cold, creeping silence, there came no sound; no cry of the death-agony which he had contrived, nor shout of the avenger of blood behind; no sobbing forth of the dear life shed by his hands, and no cry of Murder! Murder!--only a convulsive whisper of the word among the grass and leaves, and secret spies of nature, which pricked him into madness, and turned the blood in his veins to fire. He was changed, imperceptibly to himself, but in the strangest way. Every day of this week in which he had been compassing his father's death had made him more like his father. His face had lost its colour and roundness--the soft outline of youth was gone; and in its place had come a sharpened distinction of feature, unusual at his years. His hair, which, to his great wonder, came out in handfuls when he dressed it, fell lank, like that of the recluse at Marchmain; and even his dress took the same resemblance, and flew back from his figure, as he went, with his restless haste of motion, from street to street. But the sneer and the disdain had almost gone out of Horace's face: he could no longer afford these light emotions. His whole soul was burnt up with passions more intense--self-horror--anxiety, more acute and devouring than ever was the anxiety of love, to know his father's fate; and, above all, that overpowering certainty of personal guilt, which all the world and all its powers could never again loosen from his self-convicted heart.