Page:Eliot - Middlemarch, vol. III, 1872.djvu/177

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BOOK V.—THE DEAD HAND.
167

made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father's hands trembling in a moment of trouble.

"No, my dear, no. I must get back."

In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation of whist, or even than the writing of penitential meditations.