On that first story, the door stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon.  He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God.  And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers.  It was not so, at least, with him.  He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime.  He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some willful illegality of nature.  He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chessboard, should break the mold of their succession?  The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance.  The like might befall Markheim:  the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him:  if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides.  These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin.  But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms.  The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on the stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings.  The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbors.  Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys.  It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing.  But the closeness of the occupation sobered him.  With the tail of his eye he saw the door—­even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his defenses.  But in truth he was at peace.  The