Page:"The Mummy" Volume 1.djvu/142

128 never seen any thing in him to censure particularly, throughout the entire of that long period, yet my aversion remains undiminished. I suppose it must be a natural antipathy, and that the pores of my body don't assimilate in shape with the atoms that emanate from his."

"He drove me almost to madness," said Edric.

"I am not surprised at that," returned Abelard; "for I know he can take a fiendlike pleasure in tormenting. He can employ the most provoking, tantalizing expressions, and yet preserve the same soft, smooth voice, and keep his palebræ half closed, and his visual organs fixed upon the ground. Indeed, I never saw the iris of his eyes dilated in my life; and then he has such a manner of raising his supercilia, curving his nose, and drawing down his depressor anguli oris when he listens to any one or replies to them, as to give the expression of a perpetual sneer to his saturnine countenance.'"

Edric's own recent personal experience bore