or to criminals in whatever they undertake, he unscrewed the iron
bars, slipped them from their places without the slightest noise,
placed them against the wall, and opened the shutters, leaning heavily
upon their hinges to keep them from creaking. The moon was shedding
its pale pure light upon the scene, and he was thus enabled to faintly
see into the room where Wilhelm and Wahlenfer were sleeping. There, he
told me, he stood still for a moment. The throbbing of his heart was
so strong, so deep, so sonorous, that he was terrified; he feared he
could not act with coolness; his hands trembled; the soles of his feet
seem planted on red-hot coal; but the execution of his plan was
accompanied by such apparent good luck that he fancied he saw a
species of predestination in this favor bestowed upon him by fate. He
opened the window, returned to the bedroom, took his case of
instruments, and selected the one most suitable to accomplish the
crime.

"When I stood by the bed," he said to me, "I commended myself
mechanically to God."

At the moment when he raised his arm collecting all his strength, he
heard a voice as it were within him; he thought he saw a light. He
flung the instrument on his own bed and fled into the next room, and
stood before the window. There, he conceived the utmost horror of
himself. Feeling his virtue weak, fearing still to succumb to the
spell that was upon him he sprang out upon the road and walked along
the bank of the Rhine, pacing up and down like a sentinel before the
inn. Sometimes he went as far as Andernach in his hurried tramp; often
his feet led him up the slope he had descended on his way to the inn;
and sometimes he lost sight of the inn and the window he had left open
behind him. His object, he said, was to weary himself and so find