Jenifer's Prayer

He and she stood in a room in an inn in the town of Hull--and how she wept! Crying as a child cries, with a woman's feelings joining exquisite pain to those tears; which tears, in a way wonderful and peculiar to beautiful women, scarcely disordered her face, or gave anything worse to her countenance than an indescribably pathetic tenderness.
He was older than she was by full ten years. He only watched her. And if the most acute of my readers had watched him , they would have been no wiser for their scrutiny.
At last she left the room; he had opened the door and offered his hand to her. It was night; and she changed her chamber-candle from her right hand to her left, and gave that right hand to him. He held it, while he said: I spoke because I dread the influence of the house we are going to, and of those whom you will meet there.
Thank you. Good night And so she got to a great dark bed-room, and knelt down, like a good girl as she was, and cried no more, but was in bed and asleep before he had left the place he had taken by the side of the sitting-room fire, leaning thoughtfully against the mantel-shelf, when her absence had made the room lonely.
Then he ran down stairs and rushed out into the streets of the kingly Hull--Kingston of the day of Edward I. The man we speak of was no antiquary, and he troubled himself neither with the Kingston of the royal Edward nor the Vaccaria of the abbot from whom the place was bought; he walked at a quick pace through streets dim and streets lighted, toward the ships, or among the houses; to where he could see the great headland of Holderness, or behold nothing at all but the brick wall that prevented his going further, and told him by strong facts that he had lost his way. So he wandered, walking fast often--again, walking slowly; his head bowed down, his features working, and his eyes flashing--clenched hands, or hands clasped on his breast, as if to keep down the surging waves of memory, which carried on their crests many things which now he could only gnash his teeth at in withering vexation.