Jedd's boldly-expressed opinion that the patient
was the victim of foul play; the systematic exclusion of Philip Sheldon
from the sick-room, followed immediately by symptoms of amelioration,
leading to gradual recovery.
All this Captain Paget heard with an awe-stricken countenance. The
distance that divides the shedder of blood from all other wrong-doers is
so great, that the minor sinner feels himself a saint when he
contemplates the guilt of the greater criminal.
"Great God! is this possible?" exclaimed the Captain, with a shudder.
"And I have taken that man's hand!"
Later in the evening, when Diana had left him, and he had been thinking
seriously of his own career, and those many transactions of his troubled
life which, in the slang denomination of the day, would be called
"shady," he derived some scrap of comfort from one consideration.
"I never hurt a worm," he murmured to himself, complacently. "No, I can
lay my hand upon my heart and say, I never hurt a worm."
The Captain did not pause to reflect that some of the merit involved in
this amiable trait of character might have been referable to the fact,
that he had never happened to fall upon a state of society in which a
comfortable living was to be made by the hurting of worms. He thought
only of the story he had heard about Philip Sheldon; and he told himself
that not in the direst necessity of his life could his brain have
fashioned the thought of such a deed as that, in the doing of which this
man had persevered for nearly three months.
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