You'd have got something perhaps in a small way, if you'd been less of a sneak and a listener; but you've played your cards a trifle too well." The old man had raised himself up in his bed, and rallied considerably while he made this speech.

He seemed to take a malicious pleasure in his shopman's disappointment.

But when Luke Tulliver had slowly withdrawn from the room, with a last venomous look at Marian, Jacob Nowell sank back upon his pillow exhausted by his unwonted animation.
"You don't know what a deep schemer that young man has been, Marian," he said, "and how I have laughed in my sleeve at his manoeuvres." The dull November day dragged itself slowly through, Marian never leaving her post by the sick-bed.

Jacob Nowell spent those slow hours in fitful sleep and frequent intervals of wakefulness, in which he would talk to Marian, however she might urge him to remember the doctor's injunctions that he should be kept perfectly quiet.

It seemed indeed to matter very little whether he obeyed the doctor or not, since the end was inevitable.
One of the curates of the parish came in the course of the day, and read and prayed beside the old man's bed, Jacob Nowell joining in the prayers in a half-mechanical way.