Emily joined him, however, before long.  At her entrance he caught up the first bottle his hand fell upon, and seemed to be examining it.

‘What is that?’ Emily asked, noticing his intentness, which in reality had no meaning.

’This?  Oh, cyanide of potassium.  I was looking—­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 Hoods’ house; he watched the extinguishing of the lights in window after window, and, when all were gone, made away with curses on his lips, only to return an hour