JULIUS MARTIN LAMPRECHT, arrested and remanded on a charge of murder, lay on the bench in his cell in the lock-up at Knapefiord, staring into the gray gloom about him. He was telling himself, as he had done so many times since his arrest, that he was not really guilty, and that there was really no need to confess. "Now, if I really had been," he said to himself, recollecting his own words at his examination that same morning--"if I really had been guilty of cracking in the skulls of two old people, I should never deny it for a moment. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--I know about that. And I know that justice must be done. And better to take your punishment in this world than have it to come in the next, where it lasts through all eternity." The accused was a man about forty-five years of age, and looked almost a giant as he lay there in his cell. His hair was fair and curly as a child's, his complexion had the delicate colouring of youth, with a touch of deeper warmth on the cheeks. A handsome face, on the whole, with well-cut features. Only the eyes, though handsome too in a way, were unprepossessing, with a look in them now staring boldly, now flitting uncertainly from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner. "Each according to his kind," he thought. "Judges and public prosecutors and that sort must be taken their way. Have to talk a special sort of truth to them, by reason that the real truth cannot reach their hearts, unless it be interpreted unto them." And all the time he lay here telling himself that he had really committed no murder; he saw himself cold and hungry, dressed in miserable beggar's rags, coming in late one evening to a lonely village hidden away among barren, rocky hills. The door had by accident been left unfastened; he remembered how terrified the old folk had been as they looked up and saw him come in; how hurriedly they had closed the drawer in the table at which they sat. He had spoken kindly, sat down with them by the fire, to warm himself, eaten the food they gave him without hesitation, but aware all the time that they were far from glad of his company, and wished him a thousand miles away. "And when you happen to be an old convict, sentenced to imprisonment for life, and let out after twenty years of it for exemplary behaviour, it's only natural to be suspected. I can't blame any one for that. I might have thought the same myself." Once more he was quoting from his defence of the morning.