A snake can sometimes
creep under her perch, and glare, and keep hissing, till she shudders
and droops and lays her plumage in the dust.
CHAPTER IX.
GENERALLY deliberate crimes are followed by some great punishment; but
they are also often attended in their course by briefer
chastisements--single strokes from the whip that holds the round dozen
in reserve. These precursors of the grand expiation are sharp but
kindly lashes, for they tend to whip the man out of the wrong road.
Such a stroke fell on Richard Bassett: he saw Bella Bruce sweep past
him, clinging to her husband, and shuddering at himself. For this,
then, he had plotted and intrigued and written an anonymous letter. The
only woman he had ever loved at all went past him with a look of
aversion, and was his enemy's wife, and would soon be the mother of
that enemy's children, and blot him forever out of the coveted
inheritance.
The man crept home, and sat by his little fireside, crushed. Indeed,
from that hour he disappeared, and drank his bitter cup alone.
After a while it transpired in the village that he was very ill. The
clergyman went to visit him, but was not admitted. The only person who
got to see him was his friend Wheeler, a small but sharp attorney, by
whose advice he acted in country matters.
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