The boy had been busy here.  There were evidences of him—­evidences of a child rather than a man.  Boyish forethought stared her in the face and staggered her by its ghastly incongruities with the things this premeditating youth had done.  Here were provisions, not such as a man would have selected to stand a siege, but the taste of a schoolboy.  She looked at the supplies spread here—­tins of preserved food, packets of chocolate, bottles of ginger beer, bananas, biscuits.  But it seemed that the hoard had not been touched.  One tin of potted salmon had been opened, but no part of the contents was consumed.  Either accident had changed his purpose and frightened him elsewhere at the last moment, or the energies and activities that had gone to pile this accumulation were all spent in the process and now he did not need them.

Then she looked further, to the extremity of the den he had made, and there, lying comfortably on a pile of shavings, Estelle found him.

She guessed that the storm and stress of his crime had exhausted him and thrown him into heaviest possible physical slumber after great mental tribulation.  She shuddered as she looked down on him and a revulsion, a loathing tempted her to creep away again before he awakened.  She did not think of him as a patricide, nor did her own loss entirely inspire the emotion; she never associated him with that, but kept him outside it, as she would have kept some insensible or inanimate object had such been responsible for Ironsyde’s end.  It was the sudden thought of all Raymond’s death might mean—­not to her but the world—­that turned her heart to stone for a fearful second as she looked down upon the unconscious figure.  Her own sorrow was sealed at its fountains for the time.  But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed.  And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep’s primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also.  Who had lost more than he by his unreason?  If her heart did not melt then, it grew softer.

But there was more to learn before she left him and the truth can be recorded.

Abel had killed his father and hastened to his lair exultant.  He had provided for what should follow and vaguely hoped that presently, before his stores were spent, the way would be clearer for escape.  He assured himself safe from discovery and guessed that when a fortnight was passed, he might safely creep out, reach a port, find work in a ship and turn his back upon England for ever.

That was his general plan before the deed.  Afterwards all changed for him.  He then found himself a being racked and over-mastered by new sensations.  The desirable thing that he had done changed its features, even as death changes the features of life; the ideal, so noble and seemly before, when attained assumed such a shape as, in one of Abel’s heredity, it was bound to assume.  Not at once did the change appear, but as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand in the clear, triumphant sky of his achievement.  Even so an apple, that once he had stolen and hidden, was bruised unknown to him and thus contained the seed of death, that made it rot before it was ripe.  The decay spread and the fruit turned to filth before he could win any enjoyment from it.