He was a taller and heavier man than I was; and struggled with me, knowing that he was struggling for his life.  He never shook my grasp on him for a moment; but he dragged me out into the road—­dragged me away eight or ten yards from the street.  The heavy gasps of approaching suffocation beat thick on my forehead from his open mouth:  he swerved to and fro furiously, from side to side; and struck at me, swinging his clenched fists high above his head.  I stood firm, and held him away at arm’s length.  As I dug my feet into the ground to steady myself, I heard the crunching of stones—­the road had been newly mended with granite.  Instantly, a savage purpose goaded into fury the deadly resolution by which I was possessed.  I shifted my hold to the back of his neck, and the collar of his coat, and hurled him, with the whole impetus of the raging strength that was let loose in me, face downwards, on to the stones.

In the mad triumph of that moment, I had already stooped towards him, as he lay insensible beneath me, to lift him again, and beat out of him, on the granite, not life only, but the semblance of humanity as well; when, in the blank stillness that followed the struggle, I heard the door of the hotel in the street open once more.  I left him directly, and ran back from the square—­I knew not with what motive, or what idea—­to the spot.

On the steps of the house, on the threshold of that accursed place, stood the woman whom God’s minister had given to me in the sight of God, as my wife.

One long pang of shame and despair shot through my heart as I looked at her, and tortured out of its trance the spirit within me.  Thousands on thousands of thoughts seemed to be whirling in the wildest confusion through and through my brain—­thoughts, whose track was a track of fire—­thoughts that struck me with a hellish torment of dumbness, at the very time when I would have purchased with my life the power of a moment’s speech.  Voiceless and tearless, I went up to her, and took her by the arm, and drew her away from the house.  There was some vague purpose in me, as I did this, of never quitting my hold of her, never letting her stir from me by so much as an inch, until I had spoken certain words to her.  What words they were, and when I should utter them, I could not tell.

The cry for mercy was on her lips, but the instant our eyes met, it died away in long, low, hysterical moanings.  Her cheeks were ghastly, her features were rigid, her eyes glared like an idiot’s; guilt and terror had made her hideous to look upon already.

I drew her onward a few paces towards the Square.  Then I stopped, remembering the body that lay face downwards on the road.  The savage strength of a few moments before, had left me from the time when I first saw her.  I now reeled where I stood, from sheer physical weakness.  The sound of her pantings and shudderings, of her abject inarticulate murmurings for mercy, struck me with a supernatural terror.  My fingers trembled round her arm, the perspiration dripped down my face, like rain; I caught at the railings by my side, to keep myself from falling.  As I did so, she snatched her arm from my grasp, as easily as if I had been a child; and, with a cry for help, fled towards the further end of the street.