His heart yearned over this poor panting soul, so stately in form, yet so weak, so womanly, and lovable; his playmate in childhood; his sweet preceptor in boyhood; the best friend and most unselfish lover he had, or could ever hope to have, on earth; dear to him by her long life of loving sacrifice, and sacred by that their great calamity, which had fallen so much heavier on her than on him.
He soothed her, he fondled her, he kneeled at her feet, and promised her most faithfully he would never be brought home to her bruised or bleeding.

No; if the Unions rejected his offer he would go back to London with her at once.
And so, thrust from Hillsborough by the trades, and by his fears for Miss Carden, and also drawn from it by his mother's terrors, he felt himself a feather on the stream of Destiny; and left off struggling: beaten, heart-sick, and benumbed, he let the current carry him like any other dead thing that drifts.
He still plied the hammer, but in a dead-alive way.
He wrote a few cold lines to Mr.Jobson, to say that he thought it was time for a plain answer to be given to a business proposal.

But, as he had no great hope the reply would be favorable, he awaited it in a state bordering on apathy.

And so passed a miserable week.
And all this time she, for whose sake he denied himself the joy and consolation of her company, though his heart ached and pined for it, had hard thoughts of him, and vented them too to Jael Dence.
The young are so hasty in all their judgments.
While matters were in this condition, Henry found, one morning, two fresh panes of glass broken in his window.
In these hardware works the windows seldom or never open: air is procured in all the rooms by the primitive method of breaking a pane here and a pane there; and the general effect is as unsightly as a human mouth where teeth and holes alternate.

The incident therefore was nothing, if it had occurred in any other room; but it was not a thing to pass over in this room, secured by a Bramah lock, the key of which was in Henry's pocket: the panes must have been broken from the outside.