The control Holdsworth had kept upon himself, while Mrs. Parrot remained in the room, he could now put aside; indeed, the suffering caused him by his pent-up agitation imperatively demanded that the emotion should have play. Now he would walk hastily to and fro the room, and then fling himself into a chair, clasping his hands tightly, and then rise and stand before the window and send glances passionate and shrinking at the house occupied by the Conways. Now that he was close to his wife, now that any moment might reveal her walking past his window with his child, perchance, at her side, he dreaded lest the unparalleled situation he had forced himself into would prove too heavily charged with cruel conditions for him to bear. Never once then, never once afterwards, did the vaguest impulse possess him to go forth and declare himself and claim her. No! A sense of honour that was inexorable, since it prohibited the faintest echo of the soul’s secret passionate yearning to make itself audible, had decreed his silence and enforced the obedience of inclination. The only concession granted was the enjoyment of such ghostly and barren pleasure as his heart could find in the knowledge of the close neighbourhood of the two who were so dear to him. Oh! bitter waking of memory, to recall him from the sunny vision of the old times when his joy was complete, and love a permanent possession to enrich his nature with all gracious and generous emotions, to thrust him into the gray and bleak twilight of a loveless and desolate life, which the recovered power could only embitter by recurrence to the things that were lost! His eyes wandered ceaselessly and restlessly towards the window. From time to time people went by with the slow, aimless step of persons who walk for no other end than exercise. An old gentleman, with a white moustache and a dark skin, stopped, with another old gentleman, in high shirt-collars and a tail-coat, opposite Holdsworth’s window, and argued, with many galvanic flourishes of the arms and grimaces of the face. There was much political excitement abroad at that time, owing to the Reform Bill of the Grey Administration, to which the royal assent had been given; and the dark-skinned old gentleman--whose age, warmth, and intemperate flourishes were as demonstrative of his politics as his language--bade his companion take notice that, before five years were passed, England would be a tenth-rate power, governed by a mob, with a Jesuit seated on every hearth, a Nuncio preaching at St. Paul’s, not a Bible to be found in the country, and the gallows groaning under strings of honest patriots. The old gentleman in the high shirt-collars, who clearly shared his friend’s opinions, nodded savagely, asked with his shoulders, “What would you have?” and then moved on a dozen paces, to be stopped again by the other old gentleman with prophecies, maybe, more blood-chilling and awful than those he had already declaimed.