Tarraway, I shall be named, same as the devil in the droll--a purty
word enough tu."
He broke into laughter, and Joe Noy, saying a few hasty words to Thomasin,
departed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A NIGHT VISIT
He who less than an hour before had hastened hot-footed through the Newlyn
streets, whose habitual stern expression had softened before the well-known
sights and smells of the gray village, whose earnest soul was full of
happiness under the rain of the night, now turned back upon his way and
skulked through the darkness with a murderer's heart in him. The clear
spectacle of his revenge blinded lesser presentations and even distracted
his sorrow. There was no space now vacant in Noy's brain to hold the full
extent of his loss; and the fabric of happiness which for weary months on
various seas he had been building up in imagination, and which a madman's
word had now sent spinning to chaos, yet remained curiously with him, as an
impression stamped by steadfast gazing remains upon the eye. It recurred as
of old: a joy; and not till the former emotion of happiness had again and
again reappeared to be blunted, as a dream, at waking, by the new
knowledge, did truth sink into this man's mind and become part of memory.
Now he was dazed, as one who has run hard and well to a goal, and who,
reaching it, finds his prize stolen. Under these circumstances, Joe Noy's
natural fatalism--an instinct beyond the power of any religion to
destroy--appeared instant and strong.
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