So troubled
and grief-worn, that he seemed to scare the Cuckoo,
who, having cut his ten melodious announcements as
short as possible, plunged back into the Moorish Pal-
ace again, and clapped his little door behind him,
as if the unwonted spectacle were too much for his
feelings.
If the little Haymaker had been armed with the
sharpest of scythes, and had cut at every stroke into
the Carrier's heart, he never could have gashed and
wounded it, as Dot had done.
It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound
up and held together by innumerable threads of win-
ning remembrance, spun from the daily working of
her many qualities of endearment; it was a heart in
which she had enshrined herself so gently and so
closely; a heart so single and so earnest in its Truth,
so strong in right, so weak in wrong; that it could
cherish neither passion nor revenge at first, and had
only room to hold the broken image of its Idol.
But, slowly, slowly, as the Carrier sat brooding
on his hearth, now cold and dark, other and fiercer
thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind
comes rising in the night.
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