Why do I think of her? why do I think of her?  She loves that man with every fiber of her body.  How she clung to him! how she grew to him!  And I stood there and looked on it, and did not kill them both.  Seen it!  I see it now, it is burned into my eyes and my heart forever; I am in hell!—­I am in hell!—­Hold up, you blundering fool; has the devil got into you, too?—­Perdition seize him!  May he die and rot before the year’s out, ten thousand miles from home! may his ship sink to the bottom of the ——.  What right have I to curse the man, as well as drive him across the sea?  Curse yourself, John Meadows.  They are true lovers, and I have parted them, and looked on and seen their tears.  Heaven pity them and forgive me.  So he knew of his brother’s love for her, after all.  Why didn’t he speak to me, I wonder, as well as to Will Fielding?  The old Jew warned him against me, I’ll swear.  Why? why because you are a respectable man, John Meadows, and he thought a hint was enough to a man of character.  ‘I do suppose I am safe from villainy here,’ says he.  That lad spared me; he could have given me a red face before them all.  Now if there are angels that float in the air and see what passes among us sinners, how must John Meadows have looked beside George Fielding that moment?  This love will sink my soul!  I can’t breathe between these hedges; my temples are bursting!—­Oh! you want to gallop, do you? gallop, then, and faster than you ever did since you were foaled—­confound ye!” With this he spurred his mare furiously up the bank, and went crushing through the dead hedge that surmounted it.  He struck his hat, at the same moment, fiercely from his head (it was fast by a black ribbon to his button-hole), and as they lighted by a descent of some two feet on the edge of a grass-field he again drove his spurs into his great fiery mare, all vein and bone.  Black Rachel snorted with amazement at the spur, and with warlike delight at finding grass beneath her feet and free air whistling round her ears, she gave one gigantic bound like a buck with arching back and all four legs in the air at once (it would have unseated many a rider but never moved the iron Meadows), and with dilating nostril and ears laid back she hurled herself across country like a stone from a sling.

Meadows’ house was about four miles and a half distant as the crow flies, and he went home to-day as the crow flies, only faster.  None would have known the staid, respectable Meadows, in this figure that came flying over hedge and ditch and brook, his hat dangling and leaping like mad behind him, his hand now and then clutching his breast, his heart tossed like a boat among the breakers, his lips white, his teeth clinched and his eyes blazing!  The mare took everything in her stride, but at last they came somewhat suddenly on an enormous high, stiff fence.  To clear it was impossible.  By this time man and beast were equally reckless; they went straight into it and through it as a bullet goes through a