Page:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (emended first edition), Volume 3.djvu/255

Rh and apprehensions. Often he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate of his perishing clay—the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading his frame; the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and all the horrors of corruption.

"If I try," said his afflicted wife, "to divert him from these things—to raise his thoughts to higher themes, it is no better:—'Worse and worse!' he groans. 'If there be really life beyond the tomb, and judgment after death, how can I face it?'—I cannot do him any good; he will neither be enlightened, nor roused, nor comforted by anything I say; and yet he clings to me with unrelenting pertinacity—with a kind of childish desperation, as if I could save him from the fate he dreads. He keeps me night and day beside him. He is holding my left hand now, while I write; he has held it thus for hours: sometimes quietly, with his pale face upturned to mine: sometimes clutching my arm with violence—the big drops