er
distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that
a tailor's seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself
upon that unknown woman's companionship, even thus far off. Then she
was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and
glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the
corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because
appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she
allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure
of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of
the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had
got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more
slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything
that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human
beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her,--whatever would
defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound,--all
such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the
heaviest is apt to be most playful.

Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for
what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so
shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of
utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who
had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter
recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the
mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive,
weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous
to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with
already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had
Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin
Jaffrey,--powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of
acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of
selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty
that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he
supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and
customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in
practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be
true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult
than pulli