Ralph turned about and walked back, with the flush of the sky reflected on his pale and stony face.  His lantern, not yet extinguished, burned small and feeble in his hand.  Another night was breaking to another day; another and another would yet break, and all the desolation of a heart, the ruin of many hearts—­what was it before Nature’s unswerving and unalterable course!  The phantasms of a night that had answered to his hallucinations were as nothing to the realities of a morning whose cruel light showed him only more plainly the blackness of his despair.

The sentiments of horror which now possessed him were more terrible because more spiritual than before.  To know no sepulture!  The idea was horrible in itself, horrible in its association with an old Hebrew curse more remorseless than the curse of Cain, most horrible of all because to Ralph’s heightened imagination it seemed to be a symbol—­a symbol of retribution past and to come.

Yes, it was as he had thought, as he had half thought; God’s hand was on him—­on him of all others, and on others only through him.  Having once conceived this idea in its grim totality, having once fully received the impress of it from the violence and suddenness of a ghastly occurrence, Ralph seemed to watch with complete self-consciousness the action of the morbid fancy on his mind.  He traced it back to the moment when the truth (or what seemed to him the truth) touching the murder of Wilson had been flashed upon him by a look from Simeon Stagg.  He traced it yet farther back to that night at Dunbar, when, at the prompting of what he mistook for mercy, he had saved the life of the enemy that was to wreck his own life and the lives of all that were near and dear to him.  To his tortured soul guilt seemed everywhere about him, whether his own guilt or the guilt of others, was still the same; and now God had given this dread disaster for a sign that vengeance was His, that retribution had come and would come.

Was it the dream of an overpowered imagination—­the nightmare of a distempered fancy?  Yet it would not be shaken off.  It had bathed the whole world in another light—­a lurid light.

Ralph walked fast over the fells, snatching at sprigs of heather, plucking the slim boughs from the bushes, pausing sometimes to look long at a stone, or a river, or a path that last night appeared to be as familiar to him as the palm of his hand, and had suddenly become strange and a mystery.  The shadow of a supernatural presence hung over all.

Throughout that day he walked about the fells, looking for the riderless horse, and calling to it, but neither expecting to see nor to hear it.  He saw once and again the people of Wythburn abroad on the errand that kept him abroad, but they never came within hail, and a stifling sense of shame kept him apart, none the less that he knew not wherefore such shame should fall on him, all the same that they knew not that it had fallen.