can conceive no retribution that
does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

In _Adam Bede_, Parson Irwine says to Arthur,--

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences
quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that
are hardly ever confined to ourselves.

Yet wrong-doing does not go unpunished, for the law of moral cause and
effect ever holds good. This is the teaching of the first chapter of _Felix
Holt_.

There is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some
downfall of blindly climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some
quickly satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old
paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny--some tragic
mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that
went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised
the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between
will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world, for
there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make
human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying
existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of
murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and
joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer--committed to no sound except that
of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the
face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears.
Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into
no human ear.

In the same novel we are told, that--

To the end of men's struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink
from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight
and die.

The same teaching is to be found in the motto of _Daniel Deronda_, where we
are bidden to fear the evil tendencies of our own souls.

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.

The manner in which George Eliot believes Nemesis works out her results has
already been indicated. Her effec