Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/303

Rh the Prisoner. But as alone conspicuous throughout the motionless and breathless crowd, the judge and criminal gazed upon each other; and as the eyes of the spectators wandered on each, a thrilling and electric impression of a powerful likeness between the doomed and the doomer, for the first time in the trial, struck upon the audience, and increased, though they scarcely knew why, the sensation of pain and dread which the Prisoner's last words excited. Perhaps it might have chiefly arisen from a common expression of fierce emotion conquered by an iron and stern character of mind, or perhaps, now that the ashy paleness of exhaustion had succeeded the excited flush on the prisoner's face, the similarity of complexion thus obtained, made the likeness more obvious than before; or perhaps the spectators had not hitherto fixed so searching, or, if we may so speak, so alternating a gaze upon the two. However that be, the resemblance between the men, placed as they were in such wildly different circumstances—that resemblance which, as we have hinted, had at certain moments occurred startlingly to Lucy, was now plain and unavoidably striking:—the same