But she HAS done
all this. Her good and loving but shallow nature is now at rest from the
agonies of bereavement, and nought remains but sad and tender regrets.
She can better endure that than poverty: cursed poverty, which has
brought her and me to this, and is the only real evil in the world, but
bodily pain."
Then came a struggle, that lasted a whole week, and knitted his brows,
and took the color from his cheek; but it ended in the triumph of love
and hate, over conscience and common sense. His Rosa should not be poor;
and he would cheat some of those contemptible creatures called men, who
had done him nothing but injustice, and at last had sacrificed his life
like a rat's.
When the struggle was over, and the fatal resolution taken, then he
became calmer, less solitary, and more sociable.
Phoebe, who was secretly watching him with a woman's eye, observed this
change in him, and, with benevolent intentions, invited him one day to
ride round the farm with her. He consented readily. She showed him the
fields devoted to maize and wheat, and then the sheepfolds. Tim's sheep
were apparently deserted; but he was discovered swinging head downwards
from the branch of a camel-thorn, and seeing him, it did strike one that
if he had had a tail he would have been swinging by that.
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