ts. I lit no lamps, fearing some Martian
might come beating that part of London for food in the night. Before
I went to bed I had an interval of restlessness, and prowled from
window to window, peering out for some sign of these monsters. I
slept little. As I lay in bed I found myself thinking consecutively--a
thing I do not remember to have done since my last argument with the
curate. During all the intervening time my mental condition had been
a hurrying succession of vague emotional states or a sort of stupid
receptivity. But in the night my brain, reinforced, I suppose, by the
food I had eaten, grew clear again, and I thought.

Three things struggled for possession of my mind: the killing of
the curate, the whereabouts of the Martians, and the possible fate of
my wife. The former gave me no sensation of horror or remorse to
recall; I saw it simply as a thing done, a memory infinitely
disagreeable but quite without the quality of remorse. I saw myself
then as I see myself now, driven step by step towards that hasty blow,
the creature of a sequence of accidents leading inevitably to that. I
felt no condemnation; yet the memory, static, unprogressive, haunted
me. In the silence of the night, with that sense of the nearness of
God that sometimes comes into the stillness and the darkness, I stood
my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear. I
retraced every step of our conversation from the moment when I had
found him crouching beside me, heedless of my thirst, and pointing to
the fire and smoke that streamed up from the ruins of Weybridge. We
had been incapable of co-operation--grim chance had taken no heed of
that. Had I foreseen, I should have left him at Halliford. But I did
not foresee; and crime is to foresee and do. And I set this down as I
have set all this story down, as it was. There were no witnesses--all
these things I might have concealed. But I set it down, and the
reader must form his judgment as he will.

And when, by an effort, I had set aside that picture of a prostrate
body, I faced the problem of the Martians and the fate of my wife. For
the former I had no data; I could imagine a hundred things, and so,
unhappily, I could for the latter. And suddenly that night became
terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I
found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and
painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return fro