[A Rogue’s Life by Wilkie Collins]@TWC D-Link book
A Rogue’s Life

CHAPTER IX
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But the doctor was much the more respectable-looking man of the two; his baldness was more intellectual and benevolent; there was a delicacy and propriety in the pulpiness of his fat white chin, a bland bagginess in his unwhiskered cheeks, a reverent roughness about his eyebrows and a fullness in his lower eyelids, which raised him far higher, physiognomically speaking, in the social scale, than my old prison acquaintance.

Put a shovel-hat on Gentleman Jones, and the effect would only have been eccentric; put the same covering on the head of Doctor Dulcifer, and the effect would have been strictly episcopal.
"How did you get here ?" he repeated, still without showing the least irritation.
I told him how I had got in at the second-floor window, without concealing a word of the truth.

The gravity of the situation, and the sharpness of the doctor's intellects, as expressed in his eyes, made anything like a suppression of facts on my part a desperately dangerous experiment.
"You wanted to see what I was about up here, did you ?" said he, when I had ended my confession.

"Do you know ?" The pistol barrel touched my cheek as he said the last words.

I thought of all the suspicious objects scattered about the room, of the probability that he was only putting this question to try my courage, of the very likely chance that he would shoot me forthwith, if I began to prevaricate.


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