the less occasion to raise strictness into principle or do
battle for a farthing. True, again, there was nothing excessive in these
relaxations, or I would have been no party to them. But the whole thing
marked a change, very slight yet very perceptible; and though no man
could say my master had gone at all out of his mind, no man could deny
that he had drifted from his character. It was the same to the end, with
his manner and appearance. Some of the heat of the fever lingered in his
veins: his movements a little hurried, his speech notably more voluble,
yet neither truly amiss. His whole mind stood open to happy impressions,
welcoming these and making much of them; but the smallest suggestion of
trouble or sorrow he received with visible impatience, and dismissed
again with immediate relief. It was to this temper that he owed the
felicity of his later days; and yet here it was, if anywhere, that you
could call the man insane. A great part of this life consists in
contemplating what we cannot cure; but Mr. Henry, if he could not
dismiss solicitude by an effort of the mind, must instantly and at
whatever cost annihilate the cause of it; so that he played alternately
the ostrich and the bull. It is to this strenuous cowardice of pain that
I have to set down all the unfortunate and excessive steps of his
subsequent career. Certainly this was the reason of his beating M'Manus,
the groom, a thing so much out of all his former practice, and which
awakened so much comment at the time. It is to this, again, that I must
lay the total loss of near upon two hundred pounds, more than the half
of which I could have saved if his impatience would have suffered me.
But he preferred loss or any desperate extreme to a continuance of
mental suffering.

All this has led me far from our immediate trouble: whether he
remembered or had forgotten his late dreadful act; and if he remembered,
in what light he viewed it. The truth burst upon us suddenly, and was
indeed one of the chief surprises of my life. He had been several times
abroad, and was now beginning to walk a little with, an arm, when it
chanced I should be left alone with him upon the terrace. He turned to
me with a singular furtive smile, such as schoolboys use when in fault;
and says he, in a private whisper, and without the least preface: "Where
have you buried him?"

I could not make one sound in answer.

"Where have you buried him?" he repeated. "I want to see his grave."