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“Lydia was a dear creature: in many respects she made me an admirable wife. Her affection for me was canine–positively. But she was fat, sir; her face a jelly, her shoulders mountainous. Moreover, her voice!–it was my cruciation–monotonously, regularly, desperately voluble. If she talked of archangels, they became insignificant–and her themes, in ordinary, were of the pettiest. Her waist, sir, and my arm had once been commensurate: now not three of Homer’s heroes could embrace her. Her voice could once touch my heart-strings into music; it brayed them now, between the millstones of the commonplace. Figure to yourself a man of my sensibility condemned to live on these terms!”

He paused, tightened his grasp on his knee, and pursued.

“You remember, sir, the story of the baker in Langius? He narrates that a certain woman conceived a violent desire to bite the naked shoulders of a baker who used to pass underneath her window with his wares. So imperative did this longing become, that at length the woman appealed to her husband, who (being a good-natured man, and unwilling to disoblige her) hired the baker, for a certain price, to come and be bitten. The man allowed her two bites, but denied a third, being unable to contain himself for pain. The author goes on to relate that, for want of this third bite, she bore one dead child, and two living. My own case,” continued the Reverend William, “was somewhat similar. Lydia’s unrelieved babble reacted upon her bulk, and awoke in me an absorbing, fascinating desire to strike her. I longed to see her quiver. I fought against the feeling, stifled it, trod it down: it awoke again. It filled my thoughts, my dreams; it gnawed me like a vulture. A hundred times while she sat complacently turning her inane periods, I had to hug my fist to my breast, lest it should leap out and strike her senseless. Do I weary you? Let me proceed:–

“That Sunday evening we sat, one on each side of the hearth, in the Vicarage drawing-room. She was talking–talking; and I sat tapping my foot and whispering to myself, ‘You are too fat, Lydia, you are too fat.’ Her talk ran on the two sermons I had preached that day, the dresses of the congregation, the expense of living, the parish ailments–inexhaustible, trivial, relentless. Suddenly she looked up and our eyes met. Her voice trailed off and dropped like a bird wounded in full flight. She stood up and took a step towards me. ‘Is anything the matter, William?’ she asked solicitously. ‘You are too fat, my dear,’ I answered, laughing, and struck her full in the face with my fist.

“She did not quiver much–not half enough–but dropped like a half-full sack on to the carpet. I caught up a candle and examined her. Her neck was dislocated. She was quite dead.”

The madman skipped up from his boulder, and looked at me with indescribable cunning.

“I am so glad, sir,” he said, “that you did not bleed when I struck you; it was a great mercy. The sight of blood affects me–ah!” he broke off with a subtle quiver and drew a long breath. “Do you know the sands by Woeful Ness–the Twin Brothers?” he asked.

I knew that dreary headland well. For half a mile beyond the grey Church and Vicarage of Bleakirk it extends, forming the northern arm of the small fishing-bay, and protecting it from the full set of the tides. Towards its end it breaks away sharply, and terminates in a dorsal ridge of slate-coloured rock that runs out for some two hundred feet between the sands we call the Twin Brothers. Of these, that to the south, and inside the bay, is motionless, and bears the name of the ‘Dead-Boy;’ but the ‘Quick-Boy,’ to the north, shifts continually. It is a quicksand, in short; and will swallow a man in three minutes.