But he followed himself from point to point, and from moment to moment,
and accounted for himself to himself without any lapse whatever; unless,
indeed, his brain had played him false and he had gone out of the house
again after going into it, and followed Tom and struck him down.
With what? The Doctor said with some blunt instrument like a hammer.
Where could he have obtained it? What had he done with it?
The idea, while it lasted, was horrible. But he shook it off at last
and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought
of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the
length of wishing him dead. The whole idea was absurd.
All these things he thought over as, his first essential labours
completed, he lay under the screen of the ridge and watched the sun
dropping towards Guernsey in a miracle of eventide glories.
Below him, the long slow seas rocketted along the ragged black base of
his rock with mighty roarings and tumultuous bursts of foam, and on the
ledges the gulls and cormorants squabbled and shrieked, and took long
circling flights without fluttering a wing, to show what gulls could do,
or skimmed darkly just above the waves and into them, to show that
cormorants were never satisfied.
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