In other words, it is highly
probable that her death had been hastened by the moral rather than the
physical shock of the noise; by disappointment; by the bitter
reflection that she would never survive to learn what this new scandal,
evidently an interesting one, was about.
The doctor, for reasons which he deemed sufficient, had recommended a
speedy interment; it was fixed for that morning. The fall of ashes had
put the ceremony out of the question. There she lay. And in the room
below sat her bereaved stepbrother, distractedly gazing out of the
window upon the darkness of Erebus.
It harmonized with the darkness of his mourning trousers, newly creased
but not newly purchased; and of his soul. He saw his worldly existence
menaced--tottering to its fall. All these catastrophes, so crushing, so
unexpected, filled him with a kind of primeval terror. Mr. Parker was
neither a devout believer nor the reverse. He was a fool and liable, as
such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic
fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion.
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