being alive, as he had been with grief a little while before, thinking
her dead.

He took her in his arms, hugging her to him and thanking God a dozen
times for her preservation. But his kissing and fondling her had very
little effect now, for she did not answer him by licking or soft looks,
but stayed huddled up and sullen, with her hair bristling on her neck
and her ears laid back every time he touched her. At first he thought
this might be because he had touched some broken bone or tender place
where she had been hurt, but at last the truth came to him.

Thus he was again to suffer, and though the pain of knowing her
treachery to him was nothing to the grief of losing her, yet it was more
insidious and lasting. At first, from a mere nothing, this pain grew
gradually until it was a torture to him. If he had been one of your
stock ordinary husbands, such a one who by experience has learnt never
to enquire too closely into his wife's doings, her comings or goings,
and never to ask her, "How she has spent the day?" for fear he should be
made the more of a fool, had Mr. Tebrick been such a one he had been
luckier, and his pain would have been almost nothing. But you must
consider that he had never been deceived once by his wife in the course
of their married life. No, she had never told him as much as one white
lie, but had always been frank, open and ingenuous as if she and her
husband were not husband and wife, or indeed of opposite sexes. Yet we
must rate him as very foolish, that living thus with a fox, which beast
has the same reputation for deceitfulness, craft and cunning, in all
countries, all ages, and amongst all races of mankind, he should expect
this fox to be as candid and honest with him in all things as the
country girl he had married.