This letter, forwarded
by a banker and arriving in Mrs. Pocock's absence, had been placed
in evidence, and it drew from the fact of its being unopened a sudden
queer power to intensify the reach of its author. It brought home
to him the scale on which Mrs. Newsome--for she had been copious
indeed this time--was writing to her daughter while she kept HIM in
durance; and it had altogether such an effect upon him as made him
for a few minutes stand still and breathe low. In his own room, at
his own hotel, he had dozens of well-filled envelopes superscribed
in that character; and there was actually something in the renewal
of his interrupted vision of the character that played straight
into the so frequent question of whether he weren't already
disinherited beyond appeal. It was such an assurance as the sharp
downstrokes of her pen hadn't yet had occasion to give him; but
they somehow at the present crisis stood for a probable
absoluteness in any decree of the writer. He looked at Sarah's name
and address, in short, as if he had been looking hard into her
mother's face, and then turned from it as if the face had declined
to relax. But since it was in a manner as if Mrs. Newsome were
thereby all the more, instead of the less, in the room, and were
conscious, sharply and sorely conscious, of himself, so he felt
both held and hushed, summoned to stay at least and take his
punishment.
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