g--no, it's nothing. Will
you read me something for half an hour, Emily?'

By this means he would avoid talking, and he knew that the girl was
always delighted by the request. She generally read poetry of a kind she
thought might touch him, longing to establish more of intellectual
sympathy between him and herself. So she did to-night. Hood scarcely
followed after the first line; he became lost in feverish brooding. When
she laid the volume down, he looked up and held out his hand to her.
She, at all events, would not disregard his caress; indeed, Emily took
the hand and kissed it.

Then began one of the more intimate conversations which sometimes took
place between them. Emily was driven now and then to endeavour to make
clear to him her inner life, to speak of her ideals, her intellectual
convictions. He listened always with an air of deep humility, very
touching in a parent before a child. Her meaning was often dark to his
sight, but he strove hard to comprehend, and every word she uttered had
for him a gospel sanction. To-night his thoughts strayed; her voice was
nothing but the reproach of his own soul; the high or tender words were
but an emphasis of condemnation, reiterated, pitiless. She was speaking
thus out of her noble heart to him--him, the miserable hypocrite; he
pretended to listen and to approve. His being was a loathed burden.

If she had spoken thus last night, surely her voice would have dwelt
with him through the hour of temptation. Oh, could it not be morning
again, and the day yet to live? The clock below wheezed out nine strokes
as if in answer.

CHAPTER X

AT THE SWORD'S POINT

Dagworthy in these days could scarcely be deemed a man, with humanity's
plenitude of interacting motives, of contrasting impulses, of varying
affections. He was become one passion, a personified appetite. He went
through his routine, at the mill and elsewhere, in a mechanical way; all
the time his instincts and habits subjugated themselves to the frenzy
which chafed at the centres of his life. In his face you saw the
monomaniac. His eyes were bloodshot; his lips had a parched yellowness
of tone; his skin seemed dry and burning. Through the day he talked,
gave orders, wrote letters, and, by mere force of lifelong habit, much
in his usual way; at night he wandered about the Heath, now at a great
pace, driven by his passions, now loitering, stumbling. Between dark and
dawn he was fifty times in front of the Hood