“I tell you what,” said the tempter, as the clock struck three, “whatever you do, make haste; by morning’s dawn the house and garden will be searched, no doubt, and the crocks found in your possession.  Listen to me—­I’m your friend, bless you! remember the apoplexy.  Pike Island yonder is an unfrequented place; take the punt, hide all there now, and go at your best leisure to examine afterwards; but whatever you do, make haste, my man.”

Then Jennings crept out by the lawn-door, thereby rousing the house-dog; but he skirted the laurels in their shadow, and it was dark and mizzling, so he reached the punt both quickly and easily.

The quiet, and the gloom, and the dropping rain, strangely affected him now, as he plied his punt-pole; once he could have wept in his remorse, and another time he almost shrieked in fear.  How lonesome it seemed! how dreadful! and that death-dyed face behind him—­ha! woman, away I say!  But he neared the island, and, all shoeless as he was, crept up its muddy bank.

“Hallo! nybor, who be you a-poaching on my manor, eh? that bean’t good manners, any how.”

Ben Burke has told us all the rest.

But, when Burke had got his spoils—­when the biter had been bitten—­the robber robbed—­the murderer stripped of his murdered victim’s money—­when the bereaved miscreant, sullenly returning in the dark, damp night, tracked again the way he came upon that lonely lake—­no one yet has told us, none can rightly tell, the feelings which oppressed that God-forsaken man.  He seemed to feel himself even a sponge which, the evil one had bloated with his breath, had soaked it then in blood, had squeezed it dry again, and flung away!  He was Satan’s broken tool—­a weed pulled up by the roots, and tossed upon the fire; alone—­alone in all the universe, without countenance or sympathy from God, or man, or devil; he yearned to find, were it but a fiend to back him, but in vain; they held aloof, he could see them vaguely through the gloom—­he could hear them mocking him aloud among the patter of the rain-drops—­ha! ha! ha—­the pilfered fool!

Bitterly did he rue his crime—­fearfully he thought upon its near discovery—­madly did he beat his miserable breast, to find that he had been baulked of his reward, yet spent his soul to earn it.

Oh—­when the house-dog bayed at him returning, how he wished he was that dog! he went to him, speaking kindly to him, for he envied that dog—­“Good dog—­good dog!”

But more than envy kept him lingering there:  the wretched man did it for delay—­yes, though morn was breaking on the hills—­one more—­one more moment of most precious time.

CHAPTER XXX.

SECOND THOUGHTS.

FOR—­again he must go through that room!

No other entrance is open—­not a window, not a door:  all close as a prison:  and only by the way he went, by the same must he return.