You could see the
skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.
He matched Crivelli's dead _Christus_. His sunken eye-pits were of
morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hollows
and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their reign in his
face twenty years before their time.
"I was ill over there, you know," he said. "I am all right now."
As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to give
way, and he suddenly sat down to save himself from falling. It was
only a slight attack of faintness, resulting from the tedious day's
journey, and the excitement of arrival.
"Has any letter come for me lately?" he asked. "I received the
last you sent on by the merest chance, and after considerable delay
through being inland; or I might have come sooner."
"It was from your wife, we supposed?"
"It was."
Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on to him,
knowing he would start for home so soon.
He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much disturbed to read
in Tess's handwriting the sentiments expressed in her last hurried
scrawl to him.
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do
not deserve it.
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