he party.

"What do they say,--what?" said Mauleverer, putting his hand to his ear.

The bishop answered hastily; and Mauleverer, as he heard the reply,
forgot for once his susceptibility to cold, and hurried out to the
carriage door. His guests followed.

They found Brandon leaning against the farther corner of the
carriage,--a corpse. One hand held the check-string, as if he had
endeavoured involuntarily but ineffectually to pull it. The right side
of his face was partially distorted, as by convulsion or paralysis; but
not sufficiently so to destroy that remarkable expression of loftiness
and severity which had characterized the features in life. At the same
time the distortion which had drawn up on one side the muscles of the
mouth had deepened into a startling broadness the half sneer of derision
that usually lurked around the lower part of his face. Thus unwitnessed
and abrupt had been the disunion of the clay and spirit of a man who, if
he passed through life a bold, scheming, stubborn, unwavering
hypocrite, was not without something high even amidst his baseness, his
selfishness, and his vices; who seemed less to have loved sin than by
some strange perversion of reason to have disdained virtue, and who, by
a solemn and awful suddenness of fate (for who shall venture to indicate
the judgment of the arch and unseen Providence, even when it appears
to mortal eye the least obscured?), won the dreams, the objects, the
triumphs of hope, to be blasted by them at the moment of acquisition!

CHAPTER XXXVI.

AND LAST.

Subtle, Surly,--Mammon, Dol,
Hot Ananias, Dapper, Dragger,--all
With whom I traded.
The Alchemist.

As when some rural citizen-retired for a fleeting holiday, far from the
cares of the world strepitumque Romae,--["And the roar of
Rome."]--to the sweet shades of Pentonville or the remoter plains of
Clapham--conducts some delighted visitor over the intricacies of that
Daedalian masterpiece which he is pleased to call his labyrinth or
maze,--now smiling furtively at his guest's perplexity, now listening
with calm superiority to his futile and erring conjectures, now
maliciously accompanying him through a flattering path in which the
baffled adventurer is suddenly checked by the blank features of a
thoroughfareless hedge, now trembling as he sees the guest stumbling
unawares into the right track,