Without referring--as Munro would have done,
and, indeed, as he subsequently did--to the precise events which had
already just taken place and were still in progress about him, and which
made all parties equally obnoxious with himself to human punishment, and
for an offence far more criminal in its dye than that which the youth
laid to his charge--he could not avoid the momentary apprehension,
which--succeeding with the quickness of thought the intelligent and
conscious glance of Colleton--immediately came over him. His eye, seldom
distinguished by such a habit, quailed before it; and the deep malignity
and festering hatred of his soul toward the youth, which it so
unaccountably entertained before, underwent, by this mortification of
his pride, a due degree of exaggeration.
Ralph, though wise beyond his years, and one who, in a thought borrowed
in part from Ovid, we may say, could rather compute them by events than
ordinary time, wanted yet considerably in that wholesome, though rather
dowdyish virtue, which men call prudence.
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