e upon her for all that. He
would smite her, as she had smitten him, no matter how long the blow
might be in falling: if her affections should be entwined in any human
creatures, against them should his rage be directed; he would make her
desolate, as she had rendered him; he would turn their love for her to
hate, if it were possible, and, if not, he would destroy them. As for
her father--as for that stone devil Trevethick--it choked him to think
that nature herself might preserve him from his wrath, that the old man
might die before his hour of expiation could arrive. But Solomon Coe
would live to feel his vengeance. His hatred was at white heat now; what
would it be after twenty years of unmerited torture? To think that this
terrible punishment had befallen him through such contemptible
agencies--through such dull brains and vulgar hands--was maddening; and
yet he must needs feed upon that thought for twenty years, and keep his
senses too, that at the end they might work out his purpose to the
uttermost. There was plenty of time to plan and scheme and plot before
him, and henceforth that should be his occupation. Revenge should be his
latest thought and his earliest, and all night long he would dream of
nothing else. His wrath against judge and jury, and the rest of
them--though if he could have slain them all with a word he would have
uttered it--was slight compared with the vehemence of his fury against
those three at Gethin. Rage possessed him wholly, and, though without
numbing him to the painful sense of his miserable doom, rendered him
almost unconscious of what was going on about him.

When he found himself in his cell again he had no recollection of how he
had got there; and the warder had to repeat his sharp command, "Put on
these clothes," before he could get him to understand that he was to
exchange his garments for the prison suit that lay before him. It was a
small matter, but it brought home to him the reality of his situation
more than any thing that had yet occurred. With the deprivation of his
clothes he seemed to be deprived of his individuality, and, in adopting
that shameful dress, to become an atom in a congeries of outcasts. From
henceforth he was not even to bear a name, but must become a number--a
unit of that great sum of scoundrels which the world was so willing to
forget. That he was to suffer under a system which had authority and
right for its basis made his case no less intolerable to him;