I traced my way back along the promontory feebly and slowly.  My weakness was so great, that I trembled in every limb.  A strange uncertainty about directing myself in the simplest actions, overcame my mind.  Sometimes, I stopped short, hesitating in spite of myself at the slightest obstacles in my path.  Sometimes, I grew confused without any cause, about the direction in which I was proceeding, and fancied I was going back to the fishing village..  The sight that I had witnessed, seemed to be affecting me physically, far more than mentally.  As I dragged myself on my weary way along the coast, there was always the same painful vacancy in my thoughts:  there seemed to be no power in them yet, of realising Mannion’s appalling death.

By the time I arrived at this village, my strength was so utterly exhausted, that the people at the inn were obliged to help me upstairs.  Even now, after some hours’ rest, the mere exertion of dipping my pen in the ink begins to be a labour and a pain to me.  There is a strange fluttering at my heart; my recollections are growing confused again—­I can write no more.

23rd.—­The frightful scene that I witnessed yesterday still holds the same disastrous influence over me.  I have vainly endeavoured to think, not of Mannion’s death, but of the free prospect which that death has opened to my view.  Waking or sleeping, it is as if some fatality kept all my faculties imprisoned within the black walls of the chasm.  I saw the livid, bleeding hands flying past them again, in my dreams, last night.  And now, while the morning is clear and the breeze is fresh, no repose, no change comes to my thoughts.  Time bright beauty of unclouded daylight seems to have lost the happy influence over me which it used formerly to possess.

25th.—­All yesterday I had not energy enough even to add a line to this journal.  The strength to control myself seems to have gone from me.  The slightest accidental noise in the house, throws me into a fit of trembling which I cannot subdue.  Surely, if ever the death of one human being brought release and salvation to another, the death of Mannion has brought them to me; and yet, the effect left on my mind by the horror of having seen it, is still not lessened—­not even by the knowledge of all that I have gained by being freed from the deadliest and most determined enemy that man ever had.

26th.—­Visions—­half waking, half dreaming—­all through the night.  Visions of my last lonely evening in the fishing-hamlet—­of Mannion again—­the livid hands whirling to and fro over my head in the darkness—­then, glimpses of home; of Clara reading to me in my study—­then, a change to the room where Margaret died—­the sight of her again, with her long black hair streaming over her face—­then, oblivion for a little while—­then, Mannion once more; walking backwards and forwards by my bedside—­his death, seeming like a dream; his watching me through the night like a reality to which I had just awakened—­Clara walking opposite to him on the other side—­Ralph between them, pointing at me.