In order that he might marry Maud and so cover up his robbery, he had taken upon him the awful burden of blood. Now Maud had slipped through his grasp, and there was a chance his theft might still remain undisclosed. What was his position with regard to the deed of the seventeenth of August? If the warm-breathing body of his wife were by his side he should be in no worse position. When the dusk came down upon the earth, when the fields lay under the shadow of the wings of ill angels, the warm and breathing body of his wife was not at his side, but there, no matter where he might sit, was the clammy cold thing he had left that night on the top of the Tower of Silence. It lay in passage and hall, and in the dining-room it was always stiff and stark behind his chair, where he could not see it, but whence the clammy chill radiating from it reached his back and froze his spirit. That was not the worst, for it was vague; not the figure of his wife so much as that of the victim of murder. Over one shoulder, he knew not which, came that face, not now calm and passionless as before, but full of love and tender reproach, an expression in which the love out-measured the reproach ten thousand-fold. It was this new look of old love made him shut his fists, and grind his teeth, and sob and groan. From the ghastly caverns of night's silence whispers of her voice came to him pleading for mercy. "Do not, for God's sake, Wat, do not send me in my sin before my Maker!" These awful whispers made him start and stare, and caused the cold sweat to start from all the pores of his body. Then followed night and dreams. When he awoke after dreams he always thought the dreaming worse than waking. When he sought his bed at night he prayed for dreams as a relief. In the privacy of his own room, and in the still deeper privacy of dreams, he was always in her presence when the rustle of her dress made his pulses thicken with joy. These dreams were his only resting-places. But, unfortunately, not only did they not last always, but towards the end of each it changed and died in an awful sense of unascertainable disaster. Something had happened to his love, something so hideous and unheard of, that not man or woman, beast or stone, would tell him the secret. With a great shout he awoke, sprang out of bed to seek for his love through all the world, tore open the door, and found his murdered wife lying across the threshold, and upon his hands her blood. Day by day the influence of these terrors wrought on Grey until his eyes grew dim, his hands palsied, his gait feeble, and his mind dull. He forgot oftener now than formerly. In the midst of business transactions he would stop suddenly, put his hand to his head, mutter a few incoherent words, cease speaking for a while, and then exclaim piteously: "I have forgotten something! I have forgotten something!" All who came in contact with him saw he was breaking down. They said: