with no
great apprehension that John proceeded to make the circuit of the table:
his last comparatively tranquil moment for that day. No sooner had he
turned the corner, no sooner had his eyes alighted on the body, than he
gave a smothered, breathless cry, and fled out of the room and out of
the house.

It was not Alan who lay there, but a man well up in years, of stern
countenance and iron-grey locks; and it was no drunkard, for the body
lay in a black pool of blood and the open eyes stared upon the ceiling.

To and fro walked John before the door. The extreme sharpness of the air
acted on his nerves like an astringent, and braced them swiftly.
Presently, he not relaxing in his disordered walk, the images began to
come clearer and stay longer in his fancy; and next the power of thought
came back to him, and the horror and danger of his situation rooted him
to the ground.

He grasped his forehead, and staring on one spot of gravel, pieced
together what he knew and what he suspected. Alan had murdered some one:
possibly "that man" against whom the butler chained the door in Regent
Terrace; possibly another; some one at least: a human soul, whom it was
death to slay and whose blood lay spilt upon the floor. This was the
reason of the whisky-drinking in the passage, of his unwillingness to
welcome John, of his strange behaviour and bewildered words; this was
why he had started at and harped upon the name of murder; this was why
he had stood and hearkened, or sat and covered his eyes, in the black
night. And now he was gone, now he had basely fled; and to all his
perplexities and dangers John stood heir.

"Let me think, let me think," he said aloud, impatiently, even
pleadingly, as if to some merciless interrupter. In the turmoil of his
wits, a thousand hints and hopes and threats and terrors dinning
continuously in his ears, he was like one plunged in the hubbub of a
crowd. How was he to remember--he, who had not a thought to spare--that
he was himself the author, as well as the theatre, of so much confusion?
But in hours of trial the junto of man's nature is dissolved, and
anarchy succeeds.

It was plain he must stay no longer where he was, for here was a new
Judicial Error in the very making. It was not so plain where he must go,
for the old Judicial Error, vague as a cloud, appeared to fill the
habitable world; whatever it might be, it watched for him, full-grown,
in Edinburgh; it must have had its birth in San F