g else were to be done
or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake
up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her
spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that
nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real;
no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon
had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned
her away with him; but she had merely been afflicted--as lonely
sleepers often are--with a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a
morning dream!

"Now--now--I shall certainly awake!" thought Hepzibah, as she went to
and fro, making her little preparations. "I can bear it no longer I
must wake up now!"

But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just
before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlor-door, and made
a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room.

"What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now!" whispered he to
Hepzibah. "Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb!
Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in
pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet!"

As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibah's attention
to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the
initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic
grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The
brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old
home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we
can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had
perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on
the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might!

XVII The Flight of Two Owls

SUMMER as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah's few remaining teeth
chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up
Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it
the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her
feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so death-a-cold as now),
but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical
chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The
world's broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed,
is the im