Hayes.
She, poor thing, never closed her lids, except when she would have
had Mr. Hayes imagine that she slumbered; but lay beside him,
tossing and tumbling, with hot eyes wide open and heart thumping,
and pulse of a hundred and ten, and heard the heavy hours tolling;
and at last the day came peering, haggard, through the
window-curtains, and found her still wakeful and wretched.
Mrs. Hayes had never been, as we have seen, especially fond of her
lord; but now, as the day made visible to her the sleeping figure
and countenance of that gentleman, she looked at him with a contempt
and loathing such as she had never felt even in all the years of her
wedded life. Mr. Hayes was snoring profoundly: by his bedside, on
his ledger, stood a large greasy tin candlestick, containing a lank
tallow-candle, turned down in the shaft; and in the lower part, his
keys, purse, and tobacco-pipe; his feet were huddled up in his
greasy threadbare clothes; his head and half his sallow face muffled
up in a red woollen nightcap; his beard was of several days' growth;
his mouth was wide open, and he was snoring profoundly: on a more
despicable little creature the sun never shone. And to this sordid
wretch was Catherine united for ever.
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