Lilian and I didn’t sleep in one room now.  I had made some excuse to sleep on the other side of the house, because I couldn’t bear to wake up of mornings and see her lying there so pretty, looking like a lily in her white nightgown and her fair hair all tumbled about her face.  It was more than any woman could have borne to see her lying there, and think that early in the new year it was him that would see her lying like that of a morning.

And that night the place seemed very quiet and empty, as if there was more room in it for being unhappy in.  When Lilian had taken her candle and gone up to bed, I walked through all the rooms below, as uncle’s habit was, to see that all was fast for the night.  It was as I set the bolt on the door of the little lean-to shed, where the faggots were kept, that the devil entered into me all in a breath; and I thought of Lilian upstairs in her white bed, and of how the day must come, when he would see how pretty she looked and white, and I said to myself, ’No, it never shall, not if I burn for it too.’

I hope you are understanding me.  I sometimes think there is something done to folks when they are learning to be parsons as takes out of them a part of a natural person’s understandingness; and I would rather have told the doctor, but then he couldn’t have told me whether these are the kind of things Christ died to make His Father forgive, and I suppose you can.

What I did was this.  I clean forgot all about uncle and how fond I was of Whitecroft, and how much I had always loved Lilian (and I loved her then, though I know you can’t understand me when I say so), and I took all them faggots, dragging them across the sanded floor of the kitchen, and I put them in the parlour in the little wing to the left, and just under Lilian’s bedroom, and I laid them under the wooden corner cupboard where the best china is, and then I poured oil and brandy all over, and set it alight.

Then I put on my hat and jacket, buttoning it all the way down, as quiet as if I was going down to the village for a pound of candles.  And I made sure all was burning free, and out of the front door I went and up on to the Downs, and there I set me down under the wall where I could see Whitecroft.

And I watched to see the old place burn down; and at first there was no light to be seen.

But presently I see the parlour windows get redder and redder, and soon I knew the curtains had caught, and then there was a light in Lilian’s bedroom.  I see the bars of the window as you do in the ruined mill when the sun is setting behind it; and the light got more and more, till I see the stone above the front door that tells how it was builded by one of our name this long time since; and at that, as sudden as he had come, the devil left me, and I knew all in a minute that I was crouched against a wall, very cold, and my hands hooked into my hair over my ears, and my knees drawn up under my chin; and there was the