It would
not do; he was weak, and was forced to submit to the humiliation of
acknowledging the fact to himself. With a bitter scorn of his
incapacity, he began to wonder whether he could ever get so far as to
kill Paolo in the first instance. He foresaw that if he did kill him, he
could never get rid of him afterwards.

Where do people go when they die? The question rose suddenly in the mind
of the unbeliever, and seemed to demand an answer. He had answered often
enough over a pint of wine at the inn, with Gaspare Carnesecchi the
lawyer and the rest of his friends. Nowhere. That was the answer, clear
enough. When a man dies he goes to the ground, as a slaughtered ox to
the butcher's stall, or a dead horse to the knacker's. That is the end
of him, and it is of no use asking any more questions. You might as well
ask what becomes of the pins that are lost by myriads of millions, to
the weight of many tons in a year. You might as well inquire what
becomes of anything that is old, or worn out, or broken. A man is like
anything else, an agglomeration of matter, capable of a few more tricks
than a monkey, and capable of a few less than a priest. He dies, and is
swallowed up by the earth and gives no more trouble. These were the
answers Marzio was accustomed to give to the question, "Where do people
go to when they die?" Hitherto they had satisfied him, as they appear
to satisfy a very small minority of idiots.

But what would became of Paolo when Marzio had killed him? Well, in time
his body would become earth, that was all. There was something else,
however. Marzio was conscious to certainty that Paolo would in some way
or other be at his elbow ever afterwards, just as he seemed to feel his
presence this afternoon in the workshop. What sort of presence would it
be? Marzio could not tell, but he knew he should feel it. It did not
matter whether it were real to others or not, it would be too real to
him. He could never get rid of the sensation; it would haunt him and
oppress him for the rest of his life, and he should have no peace.

How could it, if it were not a real thing? Even the priests said that
the spirits of dead men did not come back to earth; how much more
impossible must it be in Marzio's view, since he denied that man had a
soul. It would then only be the effect of his imagination recalling
constantly the past deed, and a thing which only existed in imagination
did not exist at all. If it did not exist, it could