Book Five Chapter 43 The Verdict

But Hetty did not see him. She was standing in the same position Bartle Massey had described, her hands crossed over each other and her eyes fixed on them. Adam had not dared to look at her in the first moments, but at last, when the attention of the court was withdrawn by the proceedings he turned his face towards her with a resolution not to shrink.

Why did they say she was so changed? In the corpse we love, it is the likeness we see--it is the likeness, which makes itself felt the more keenly because something else was and is not. There they were--the sweet face and neck, with the dark tendrils of hair, the long dark lashes, the rounded cheek and the pouting lips--pale and thin, yes, but like Hetty, and only Hetty. Others thought she looked as if some demon had cast a blighting glance upon her, withered up the woman's soul in her, and left only a hard despairing obstinacy. But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man; and to Adam, this pale, hard-looking culprit was the Hetty who had smiled at him in the garden under the apple-tree boughs--she was that Hetty's corpse, which he had trembled to look at the first time, and then was unwilling to turn away his eyes from.