He picked it up and stuck it in his eye to stare the doctor in the face.
The action was a singular, spasmodic, hard one.

But his hands were shaking.
"By God!" he cried out, "if I had been here it should not have been so!" He got up and supported himself against the table with the shaking hands.
"It is very plain," he said, "that she has been willing to be torn to pieces upon the rack to give me the thing I wanted.

And now, good God in heaven, I feel that I would have strangled the boy with my own hands rather than lose her." In this manner, it seemed, did a rigid, self-encased, and conventional elderly nobleman reach emotion.

He looked uncanny.

His stiff dignity hung about him in rags and tatters.