eBooks Base 2000

As he listened, still conscious of contact with that surprising electric
current, Carteret found himself taking stock of his own forty-nine years
with swift and lively repugnance. To accept the sum of them, and the
limitations and restrictions that sum is currently supposed to entail,
proved just now astonishingly difficult. Damaris, as beheld in the
fantastic loveliness of the moonlight, her searching, unseeing eyes
meeting and dwelling upon his own, the look of disappointment and defeat
crossing her sweetly serious countenance, wrought upon him begetting a
dangerous madness in his blood. That it was dangerous and a madness, and
therefore promptly to be mastered and ejected, he would not permit
himself an instant's doubt. Yet it very shrewdly plagued him, daring even
to advance specious arguments upon its own behalf.
For, when he came to consider matters, was he not in perfect health, more
sound and fit than many a man but half his age? And were not his
fortunes just now at a specially happy turn, his sister, Mrs.


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