took her so indoors. Yet all the while he could scarce believe
his eyes to see her living, and felt her all over very carefully to find
if she had not some bones broken. But no, he could find none. Indeed it
was some hours before this poor silly gentleman began to suspect the
truth, which was that his vixen had practised a deception upon him, and
all the time he was bemoaning his loss in such heartrending terms, she
was only shamming death to run away directly she was able. If it had not
been that the yard gates were shut, which was a mere chance, she had got
her liberty by that trick. And that this was only a trick of hers to
sham dead was plain when he had thought it over. Indeed it is an old and
time-honoured trick of the fox. It is in Aesop and a hundred other
writers have confirmed it since. But so thoroughly had he been deceived
by her, that at first he was as much overcome with joy at his wife still
being alive, as he had been with grief a little while before, thinking
her dead.

He took her in his arms, hugging her to him and thanking God a dozen
times for her preservation. But his kissing and fondling her had very
little effect now, for she did not answer him by licking or soft looks,
but stayed huddled up and sullen, with her hair bristling on her neck
and her ears laid back every time he touched her. At first he thought
this might be because he had touched some broken bone or tender place
where she had been hurt, but at last the truth came to him.

Thus he was again to suffer, and though the pain of knowing her
treachery to him was nothing to the grief of losing her, yet it was more
insidious and lasting. At first, from a mere nothing, this pain grew
gradually until it was a torture to him. If he had been one of your
stock ordinary husbands, such a one who by experience has learnt never
to enquire too closely into his wife's doings, her comings or goings,
and never to ask her, "How she has spent the day?" for fear he should be
made the more of a fool, had Mr. Tebrick been such a one he had been
luckier, and his pain would have been almost nothing. But you must
consider that he had never been deceived once by his wife in the course
of their married life. No, she had never told him as much as one white
lie, but had always been frank, open and ingenuous as if she and her
husband were not husband and wife, or indeed of opposite sexes. Yet we
must rate him as very foolish, that living thus with a fox, which beast