he did for him accordingly.

Morning and evening MacTurk came to see him. His case, thus complicated
by a new mischance, was become one of interest in the surgeon's eyes. He
regarded him as a damaged piece of clockwork, which it would be
creditable to his skill to set agoing again. Graves and young
MacTurk--Moore's sole other visitors--contemplated him in the light in
which they were wont to contemplate the occupant for the time being of
the dissecting-room at Stilbro' Infirmary.

Robert Moore had a pleasant time of it--in pain, in danger, too weak to
move, almost too weak to speak, a sort of giantess his keeper, the three
surgeons his sole society. Thus he lay through the diminishing days and
lengthening nights of the whole drear month of November.

In the commencement of his captivity Moore used feebly to resist Mrs.
Horsfall. He hated the sight of her rough bulk, and dreaded the contact
of her hard hands; but she taught him docility in a trice. She made no
account whatever of his six feet, his manly thews and sinews; she turned
him in his bed as another woman would have turned a babe in its cradle.
When he was good she addressed him as "my dear" and "honey," and when he
was bad she sometimes shook him. Did he attempt to speak when MacTurk
was there, she lifted her hand and bade him "Hush!" like a nurse
checking a forward child. If she had not smoked, if she had not taken
gin, it would have been better, he thought; but she did both. Once, in
her absence, he intimated to MacTurk that "that woman was a
dram-drinker."

"Pooh! my dear sir, they are all so," was the reply he got for his
pains. "But Horsfall has this virtue," added the surgeon--"drunk or
sober, she always remembers to obey _me_."

* * * * *

At length the latter autumn passed; its fogs, its rains withdrew from
England their mourning and their tears; its winds swept on to sigh over
lands far away. Behind November came deep winter--clearness, stillness,
frost accompanying.

A calm day had settled into a crystalline evening. The world wore a
North Pole colouring; all its lights and tints looked like the
_reflets_[A] of white, or violet, or pale green gems. The hills wore a
lilac blue; the setting sun had purple in its red; the sky was ice, all
silvered azure; when the stars rose, they were of white crystal, not
gold; gray, or cerulean, or faint emerald hues--cool, pure, and
transparent--tinged the mass of the landscape.