Welcome back to Nighty Night, Bedtime Stories to Keep You Awake. I'm your host, Rabi

and in this week's story we learned that guilt won't even let the dead rest.

The confession of Charles Linkworth by Edward Frederick Benson Dr.

Teesdale had occasion to attend the condemned man once or twice during the week before his

execution and found him, as is often the case, when his last hope of life had vanished, quietly and perfectly resigned to his fate,

and not seeming to look forward with any dread to the morning that each hour had passed brought nearer and nearer.

The bitterness of death appeared to be over for him.

It was done with when he was told that his appeal was refused.

But for those days, while hope was not yet quite abandoned, the wretched

man had drunk of death daily. In all his experience, the doctor had never seen a man so wildly

and passionately tenacious of life,

nor one so strongly knit to this material world by the sheer animal lust of living.

Then the news that Hope could no longer be entertained was told him and his spirit passed out of the grip of that agony of torture and suspense and accepted the inevitable with indifference.

Yet the change was so extraordinary that it seemed to the with indifference.

Yet the change was so extraordinary that it seemed to the doctor rather that the news had completely

stunned his powers of feeling and he was below the numbed surface, still knit into material things as strongly as ever.

He had fainted when the result was told him, and Dr. Teesdale had been called into

attend him.

But the fit was but transient, and he came out of it into full consciousness of what had happened.

The murder had been a deed of peculiar horror and there was nothing of sympathy in the mind of the public

towards the perpetrator. Charles Linkworth, who now lay under capital sentence, was the keeper

of a small stationery store in Sheffield, and there lived with him his wife and mother.

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