Sermons usually affected Sturk no more than they did other military gentlemen.

But he was in a morbid state; and in this one or two terms or phrases, nothing in themselves, happened to touch upon a sensitive and secret centre of pain in the doctor's soul.
For instance, when he called death 'the great bankruptcy which would make the worldly man, in a moment, the only person in his house not worth a shilling,' the preacher glanced unconsciously at a secret fear in the caverns of Sturk's mind, that echoed back the sonorous tones and grisly theme of the rector with a hollow thunder.
There was a time when Sturk, like other shrewd, bustling fellows, had no objection to hear who had an execution in his house, who was bankrupt, and who laid by the heels; but now he shrunk from such phrases.

He hated to think that a clever fellow was ever absolutely beggared in the world's great game.

He turned his eye quickly from the _Gazette_, as it lay with other papers on the club table; for its grim pages seemed to look in his face with a sort of significance, as if they might some day or other have a small official duty to perform by him; and when an unexpected bankruptcy was announced by Cluffe or Toole in the club-room, it made his ear ring like a slap, and he felt sickish for half an hour after.
One of that ugly brood of dreams which haunted his nights, borrowed, perhaps, a hint from Dr.Walsingham's sermon.

Sturk thought he heard Toole's well-known, brisk voice, under his windows, exclaim, 'What is the dirty beggar doing there?
faugh!--he smells all over like carrion--ha, ha ha!' and looking out, in his dream, from his drawing-room window, he saw a squalid mendicant begging alms at his hall-door.