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Let me see thee setten by the bed.
Let me see thee, a' so good, and so forgiving. Let me see thee as
I see thee when I coom in. I can never see thee better than so.
Never, never, never!'

He had a violent fit of trembling, and then sunk into his chair.
After a time he controlled himself, and, resting with an elbow on
one knee, and his head upon that hand, could look towards Rachael.
Seen across the dim candle with his moistened eyes, she looked as
if she had a glory shining round her head. He could have believed
she had. He did believe it, as the noise without shook the window,
rattled at the door below, and went about the house clamouring and
lamenting.

'When she gets better, Stephen, 'tis to be hoped she'll leave thee
to thyself again, and do thee no more hurt. Anyways we will hope
so now. And now I shall keep silence, for I want thee to sleep.'

He closed his eyes, more to please her than to rest his weary head;
but, by slow degrees as he listened to the great noise of the wind,
he ceased to hear it, or it changed into the working of his loom,
or even into the voices of the day (his own included) saying what
had been really said. Even this imperfect consciousness faded away
at last, and he dreamed a long, troubled dream.

He thought that he, and some one on whom his heart had long been
set - but she was not Rachael, and that surprised him, even in the
midst of his imaginary happiness - stood in the church being
married. While the ceremony was performing, and while he
recognized among the witnesses some whom he knew to be living, and
many whom he knew to be dead, darkness came on, succeeded by the
shining of a tremendous light. It broke from one line in the table
of commandments at the altar, and illuminated the building with the
words. They were sounded through the church, too, as if there were
voices in the fiery letters. Upon this, the whole appearance
before him and around him changed, and nothing was left as it had
been, but himself and the clergyman. They stood in the daylight
before a crowd so vast, that if all the people in the world could
have been brought together into one space, they could not have
looked, he thought, more numerous; and they all abhorred him, and
there was not one pitying or friendly eye among the millions that
were fastened on his face. He stood on a raised stage, under his
own loom; and, looking up at the shape the loom took, and hearing
the burial service distinctly read, he knew that he was there to
suffer death. In an instant what he stood on fell below him, and
he was gone.

- Out of what mystery he came back to his usual life, and to places
that he knew, he was unable to consider; but he was back in those
places by some means, and with this condemnation upon him, that he
was never, in this world or the next, through all the unimaginable
ages of eternity, to look on Rachael's face or hear her voice.
Wandering to and fro, unceasingly, without hope, and in search of

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