Meantime Balder, coloring from shame, had stepped back from his dangerous position; and the peril was past. But the paltering irresolution which he had at all points displayed urged him to redeem himself,--else was he lower than a criminal. He went towards Gnulemah,--knelt down,--caught her dress,--he knew not what he did! In a blind dance of sentences he told her that he was a murderer, that all he had said pointed at himself, that with his own hands he had killed Hiero, whose body now lay at the bottom of the sea; many frantic words he spoke. Thus, without art or rhetoric, roughly dragged forth by head and ears, came his momentous confession into the world. Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose arrow has just flown, these words reached him:-"Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees."
Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah, swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water. She put out her arm and tenderly supported him.
"Where?" said he at length.
"Near the house,--there!" she pointed.
Balder began to walk forward doubtfully. But, suddenly realizing what lay before him, clearness and vigor ebbed back. He saw a figure turn the corner of the house. Then he leapt out and ran like a stag-hound!