Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/159

Rh judging from her hands. He was in a tremor; he felt that it would be rude to question her, and he only urged her now to take a little food. She accepted it with evident enjoyment, looking at the child continually, and then, with a fresh burst of gratitude, leaning forward to press the servant's hand, and say, "O, you are good!" Then she looked up at Mr Lyon again and said, "Is there in the world a prettier marmot?"

The evening passed; a bed was made up for the strange woman, and Mr Lyon had not asked her so much as her name. He never went to bed himself that night. He spent it in misery, enduring a horrible assault of Satan. He thought a frenzy had seized him. Wild visions of an impossible future thrust themselves upon him. He dreaded lest the woman had a husband; he wished that he might call her his own, that he might worship her beauty, that she might love and caress him. And what to the mass of men would have been only one of many allowable follies—a transient fascination, to be dispelled by daylight and contact with those common facts of which common-sense is the reflex—was to him a spiritual convulsion. He was as one who raved, and knew that he raved. These mad wishes were