He definitely braced himself to face life. There would not be much of it--to-morrow he would be arrested: meanwhile there should be no more of these illusions. There was, for instance, the illusion that the body was following him, bounding grotesquely along the hard road. He knew that again and again he turned his head to see whether anything were there, and the further the little wood was left behind the nearer did the body seem to be. He must not allow himself to think these things. Carfax was dead--Carfax was dead--Carfax was dead. It was a good thing that Carfax was dead. He had saved, he hoped, Rose Midgett--that at any rate he had done; it was a good thing for Rose Midgett that he had killed Carfax. He had, incidentally, no interest on his own account in Rose Midgett--he scarcely knew her by sight--but it was pleasant to think that she would be no longer worried. . . . Then there was that question about God. Now the river appeared, darkly, dimly below the road, the reeds rising spire-like towards the faint blue sky. That question about God--Olva had never believed in any kind of a God. His father had defied God and the Devil time and again and had been none the worse for it. And yet--here and there about the world people lived and had their being to whom this question of God was a vital question; people like Bunning and his crowd--mad, the whole lot of them. Nevertheless there was something there that had great power. That had, until to-day, been Olva's attitude, an amused superior curiosity. Now it was a larger question. There had been that moment after Carfax had fallen, a moment of intense silence, and in that moment something had spoken to Olva. It is a fact as sure as concrete, as though he himself could remember words and gesture. There had been Something there. . . . Brushing this for an instant aside, he faced next the question of his arrest. There was no one, save his father, for whom he need think. He would send his father word saying--"I have killed a beast--fairly--in the open"--that would be all. He would not be hanged--poison should see to that. Dunes had murdered, raped, tortured--never yet had they died on the gallows.