His mechanical movements stopped, his hand remained on the blind-cord, and he seemed to become breathless, as if he had suddenly found himself treading a high rope.
While he stood a sparrow lighted on the windowsill, saw him, and flew away.

Next a man and a dog walked over one of the green hills which bulged above the roofs of the town.

But Barnet took no notice.
We may wonder what were the exact images that passed through his mind during those minutes of gazing upon Lucy Savile's house, the sparrow, the man and the dog, and Lucy Savile's house again.

There are honest men who will not admit to their thoughts, even as idle hypotheses, views of the future that assume as done a deed which they would recoil from doing; and there are other honest men for whom morality ends at the surface of their own heads, who will deliberate what the first will not so much as suppose.

Barnet had a wife whose pretence distracted his home; she now lay as in death; by merely doing nothing--by letting the intelligence which had gone forth to the world lie undisturbed--he would effect such a deliverance for himself as he had never hoped for, and open up an opportunity of which till now he had never dreamed.