Page:Adventures of Susan Hopley (Volume 1).pdf/239

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224
SUSAN HOPLEY.

his wife slept the calm sleep of innocence, he, with burning hands and throbbing brow, was tossing from side to side in all the agonies of terror and remorse. How few people, if they had sufficient acquaintance with the nature of the human mind to calculate the sufferings consequent on crime, would ever commit it! and how necessary it must be to educate them into his acquaintance, and to dissipate the ignorance that veils the future from their view!

Now, that the excitement was over, he looked back with regret at the interruption his design had met with—a moment more and all would have been over, and he at rest. The struggle was past, his mind was made up—in short, the worst part of the desperate enterprise was overcome; but it was not easy to work his resolution up to the same point—his sufferings returned on him with two-fold force, but he had lost the energy necessary to fly from them. In vain, he painted to himself the horrors of being seized—-the arrival of the police officers—the tears of his wife—the wonder of his neighbours—the ill-natured triumph of the discontented butcher, baker, and publican, he was carried past their doors—the imprisonment—the trial—the execution. In vain, he asked himself why it was too late to escape it all still by the very means