At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and began to lug it over to the bed.  The bare heels of the seaman trailed on the floor noiselessly.  He was heavy with the dead weight of inanimate objects.  With a last effort Byrne landed him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet with which he covered it over.  Then he spread the curtains at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.

He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it.  The perspiration poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen blood.  Complete terror had possession of him now, a nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.

He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning at his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the end of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets round the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the expectation of a mysterious and appalling vision.  The thing which could deal death in a breath was outside that bolted door.  But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts now.  Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old time boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted Tom (he had seemed to him invincible), helped to paralyse his faculties, added to his despair.

He was no longer Edgar Byrne.  He was a tortured soul suffering more anguish than any sinner’s body had ever suffered from rack or boot.  The depth of his torment may be measured when I say that this young man, as brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and firing into his own head.  But a deadly, chilly, langour was spreading over his limbs.  It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs.  Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and stick—­horrible, grotesque, monstrous—­affiliated to the devil—­to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise of death.  And he wouldn’t be able to do anything.  Tom had struck out at something, but he was not like Tom.  His limbs were dead already.  He sat still, dying the death over and over again; and the only part of him which moved were his eyes, turning round and round in their sockets, running over the walls, the floor, the ceiling, again and again till suddenly they became motionless and stony-starting out of his head fixed in the direction of the bed.