like a hen,
striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a
heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow,
as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All
these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the
passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon
these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his
surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the
counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that
inconsiderable movement the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle
and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots
of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the
portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water.
The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with
a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings Markheim's eyes returned to the body of
his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and
strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that
ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had
feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this
bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices.
There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct
the miracle of locomotion--there it must lie till it was found. Found!
ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring
over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or
not, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when the brains were out,"
he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the
deed was accomplished--time, which had closed for the victim, had become
instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind when, first one and then another, with
every variety of pace and voice--one deep as the bell from a cathedral
turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz--the
clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered
him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle,
beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance
reflections. In many ric