Truly, I feel no horror. When I have twinges in my wounded side I do not recollect immediately how I was hurt, or when. I shall go up to-night and hide him in a sepulchre of stones from the eagle and the hoodie and the scavenging hinds.

I can feel Terry’s eyes on me. I think she believes I am horror-struck and hiding it from her. If I tell her that my  mind is free she thinks I am saying it to convince and comfort her.

It is bitter to feel her pitiful eyes on me and to watch the distress she tries in vain to hide, knowing as I do that I do not require pity, and that she is unhappy because she imagines I am in despair. How can I despair, or simulate that hideous horror that I ought to feel, I a murderer, and at peace? I long to persuade her that I am not hiding my horror from her.

We are seldom of separate minds. We think alike, we think together. Now we are divided and I lack companionship. Maybe she feels I ought to speak to her, sharing my woe. How can I speak things I do not feel, or unburden my mind of a trouble that does not beset me? Perhaps she like myself is miserable because we are divided. If I could say the things she imagines I long to say—I try saying them to myself. They sound false and forced to my own ear. It’s beyond me to ape horror and anguish of mind. I feel nothing but my tired limbs and the stabbing of my wounded side, and this quiet rediscovered country where we live.

And if by speaking I could persuade her that I feel no blood-guiltiness, how would she regard me then? I recall the day when she caught the rifle and tried to take it from me. If I said that the picture of that man falling was before my mind’s eye like the fall of a tree, as casual, as unconcerned with mortality, with what grievous eyes would she see me? I dare not, I dare not speak. I’m not a monster, surely, callous to human death; to kill a man and feel no anguish—I have felt worse pangs when a stag died in a froth of its own blood than I feel now. His blood’s on my sleeve, with my own.