He was a very kind husband, in his way, but a most incapable nurse, especially in a case of hysterics.
He came out with a desk in his hands.
'Moggy,' he said, in a low tone, seeing his other servant-woman in the dusk crossing at the foot of the stairs, 'here, take this desk, leave it in our bed-room--'tis for the mistress; tell her so by-and-by.' The wench carried it up; but poor Mrs.Nutter was in no condition to comprehend anything, and was talking quite wildly, and seemed to be growing worse rather than better.
Nutter stood alone in the hall, with his back to the door from which he had just emerged, his hands in his pockets, and the same dreary and wicked shadow over his face.
'So that----Sturk will carry his point after all,' he muttered.
On the hall wainscot just opposite hung his horse-pistols; and when he saw them, and that wasn't for a while--for though he was looking straight at them, he was staring, really, quite through the dingy wooden panel at quite other objects three hundred miles away--when he _did_ see them, I say, he growled in the same tone-- 'I wish one of those bullets was through my head, so t'other was through his.' And he cursed him with laconic intensity.

Then Nutter slapped his pockets, like a man feeling if his keys and other portable chattels are all right before he leaves his home.

But his countenance was that of one whose mind is absent and wandering.

And he looked down on the ground, as it seemed in profound and troubled abstraction; and, after a while, he looked up again, and again glared on the cold pistols that hung before him--ready for anything.

And he took down one with a snatch and weighed it in his hand, and fell to thinking again; and, as he did, kept opening and shutting the pan with a snap, and so for a long time, and thinking deeply to the tune of that castanet, and at last he roused himself, who knows from what dreams, and hung up the weapon again by its fellow, and looked about him.
The hall-door lay open, as Mary Matchwell had left it.