I'll bid her good-bye for you. Take my
advice--get out of this county somewhere, and get out of Manchester
to-night."
"I must go upstairs to get some money," and Zachariah stole into his
bedroom to take half a little hoard which was in a desk there. His
wife, as Mrs. Carter had said, was asleep. He went to her bedside
and looked at her. She was pale and worn. Lying there unconscious,
all the defects which had separated him from her vanished. In sleep
and death the divine element of which we are compounded reappears,
and we cease to hate or criticise; we can only weep or pray. He
looked and looked again. The hours of first love and courtship
passed before him; he remembered what she was to him then, and he
thought that perhaps the fault, after all, might have been on his
side, and that he had perhaps not tried to understand her. He
thought of her loneliness--taken away by him into a land of
strangers--and now he was about to desert her; he thought, too, that
she also was one of God's children just as much as he was; perhaps
more so. The tears filled his eyes, although he was a hard, strong
man not used to tears, and something rose in his throat and almost
choked him.
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