In their eyes he would seem
to have been guilty of a deliberate seduction, the one of his daughter,
the other of his destined bride. Yet, not to return to Gethin in such a
case would be worse than cowardice, since his absence would be sure to
be associated with Harry's midnight expedition. He had hitherto only
despised this Trevethick and his friend, but now, since he feared them,
he began to hate them. Bodily discomfort combined with his mental
disquietude. For the first time he felt the keenness of the moonlit air,
and shivered in it, notwithstanding the hasty strides which he now was
taking homeward. Upon the hill-top he paused, and glanced about him. All
was as it had been when he set out; there was no sign of change nor
movement. The inn, with its drawn-down blinds, seemed itself asleep. The
front-door had been left ajar, doubtless by Harry; he pushed his way in,
and silently shut it to, and shot the bolt; then he took off his boots,
and walked softly up stairs in his stockinged feet. He knew that there
was at least one person in that house who was listening with beating
heart for every noise.
The ways of clandestine love have been justly described as "full of
cares and troubles, of fears and jealousies, of impatient waiting,
tediousness of delay, and sufferance of affronts, and amazements of
discovery;" and though Richard Yorke had never read those words of our
great English divine, he had already begun to exemplify them, and was
doomed to prove them to the uttermost.
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