Good Heavens! she turned pale as she thought of him and
Fanny together.
The young man had merely muttered "By Jove, that's too d---- bad!" and
flung himself out of the room.
His wife did not observe that her mother-in-law was regarding her; she
did not see that her husband had left the room; she thought of no contest
of wits, of no game she had won or lost. She thought only of the tragical
mistake she had made--the dull, blundering crime she had committed; and
still bowed over, and gnawing her nails, she looked sideways with her
hard, round, black eyes, at Hope Wayne.
The heiress sat quietly by the side of her friend Lawrence Newt. She
was holding the hand of Mrs. Simcoe, who glanced sometimes at Lawrence,
calmly, and with no sign of regretful or revengeful remembrance. The
Honorable Budlong Dinks was walking up and down the room, stroking his
chin with his hand, not without a curiously vague indignation with the
late lamented proprietor of Pinewood.
It was a strange spectacle. A room full of living men and women who had
just heard what some of them considered their doom pronounced by a dead
man. They had carried him out of his house, cold, powerless, screwed into
the casket. They had laid him in the ground beneath the village spire,
and yet it was his word that troubled, enraged, disappointed, surprised,
and envenomed them. Beyond their gratitude, reproaches, taunts, or fury,
he lay helpless and dumb--yet the most terrible and inaccessible of
despots.
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