but one fierce
flash of anger, still hung above the heat of his mind, like a dark
rack of thundercloud. It would have burst anew into a fury of rebuke,
had he but known his daughter was listening at the door, while the
colloquy went on. It might have flamed violently, had his tenant
made any further attempt to change his purpose. She had not. She
had left the room meekly, with the same curt, awkward bow that
marked her entrance. He recalled her manner very indistinctly;
for a feeling like a mist began to gather in his mind, and make
the occurrences of moments before uncertain.

Alone, now, he was yet oppressed with a sensation that something
was near him. Was it a spiritual instinct? for the phantom stood
by his side. It stood silent, with one hand raised above his head,
from which a pale flame seemed to flow downward to his brain; its
other hand pointed movelessly to the open letter on the table beside
him.

He took the sheets from the table, thinking, at the moment, only
of George Feval; but the first line on which his eye rested was,
"In the name of the Saviour, I charge you, be true and tender to
mankind!" And the words touched him like a low voice from the grave.
Their penetrant reproach pierced the hardness of his heart. He
tossed the letter back on the table. The very manner of the act
accused him of an insult to the dead. In a moment he took up the
faded sheets more reverently, but only to lay them down again.

He had not been well that day, and he now felt worse than before.
The pain in his head had given place to a strange sense of dilation,
and there was a silent, confused riot in his fevered brain, which
seemed to him like the incipience of insanity. Striving to divert
his mind from what had passed, by reflection on other themes, he
could not hold his thoughts; they came teeming but dim, and slipped
and fell away; and only the one circumstance of his recent cruelty,
mixed with remembrance of George Feval, recurred and clung with
vivid persistence. This tortured him. Sitting there, with arms
tightly interlocked, he resolved to wrench his mind down by sheer
will upon other things; and a savage pleasure at what at once seemed
success, took possession of him. In this mood, he heard soft footsteps
and the rustle of festal garments on the stairs, and had a fierce
complacency in being able to apprehend clearly that it was his
wife and daughter going out to the party. In a moment he heard the
controlled and eve