 at once before him pallid,
lifeless, helpless - this was the very combination of circumstances to win for
the victim Mr. Yorke's liveliest interest.
    No other hand was there to raise - to aid; no other voice to question
kindly; no other brain to concert measures: he had to do it all himself. This
utter dependence of the speechless, bleeding youth (as a youth he regarded him)
on his benevolence, secured that benevolence most effectually. Well did Mr.
Yorke like to have power, and to use it: he had now between his hands power over
a fellow-creature's life: it suited him.
    No less perfectly did it suit his saturnine better-half: the incident was
quite in her way, and to her taste. Some women would have been terror-struck to
see a gory man brought in over their threshold, and laid down in their hall in
the howe of the night. There, you would suppose, was subject-matter for
hysterics. No: Mrs. Yorke went into hysterics when Jessie would not leave the
garden to come to her knitting, or when Martin proposed starting for Australia,
with a view to realize freedom, and escape the tyranny of Matthew; but an
attempted murder near her door - a half-murdered man in her best bed - set her
straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.
    Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the drudging
life of a simple maid-servant, would nurse like a heroine an hospital full of
plague patients. She almost loved Moore: her tough heart almost yearned towards
him, when she found him committed to her charge, - left in her arms, as
dependent on her as her youngest-born in the cradle. Had she seen a domestic, or
one of her daughters, give him a draught of water, or smooth his pillow, she
would have boxed the intruder's ears. She chased Jessie and Rose from the upper
realm of the house: she forbade the housemaids to set their foot in it.
    Now, if the accident had happened at the Rectory gates, and old Helstone had
taken in the martyr, neither Yorke nor his wife would have pitied him: they
would have adjudged him right served for his tyranny and meddling: as it was, he
became, for the present, the apple of their eye.
    Strange! Louis Moore was permitted to come, - to sit down on the edge of the
bed, and lean over the pillow, - to hold his brother's
