"Wuthering Heights," Vocabulary from Chapters 15-20

Then the paleness of her face--its haggard aspect having vanished as she recovered flesh--and the peculiar expression arising from her mental state, though painfully suggestive of their causes, added to the touching interest which she awakened, and--invariably to me, I know, and to any person who saw her, I should think--refuted more tangible proofs of convalescence, and stamped her as one doomed to decay.

She lifted the letter, and seemed to peruse it, and when she came to the signature she sighed; yet still I found she had not gathered its import, for, upon my desiring to hear her reply, she merely pointed to the name and gazed at me with mournful and questioning eagerness.

Most likely he supposed that I was inclined to shirk my promise, and so resolved to trust to his own audacity.

Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip and a scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers a portion of the locks she had been grasping.

You left me too; but I won't upbraid you.

"I must go, Cathy," said Heathcliff, seeking to extricate himself from his companion's arms.

To be sure, one might have doubted, after the wayward and impatient existence she had led, whether she merited a haven of peace at last.

I declined answering Mrs. Dean's question, which struck me as something heterodox.

Put your handkerchief away; don't snivel before me.

Necessity compelled me to seek shelter here, though, if I had not learned he was out of the way, I'd have halted at the kitchen, washed my face, warmed myself, got you to bring what I wanted, and departed again to anywhere out of the reach of my accursed--off that incarnate goblin!

I'd rather sit with Hindley, and hear his awful talk, than with 't' little maister' and his stanch supporter, that odious old man!

The stanchions stood too close to suffer his shoulders to follow, and I smiled, exulting in my fancied security.

I wouldn't have aided or abetted an attempt on even his life for anything.

I was in the condition of mind to be shocked at nothing; in fact, I was as reckless as some malefactors show themselves at the foot of the gallows.

I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blest as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes, precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon light of the Grange.

For a few days, I said, he seemed regardless of the puny successor to the departed; that coldness melted as fast as snow in April, and ere the tiny thing could stammer a word or totter a step, it wielded a despot's sceptre in his heart.

We at the Grange never got a very succinct account of his state preceding it; all that I did learn was on occasion of going to aid in the preparations for the funeral.

It was so tiresomely pertinacious that I resolved on requesting leave to go to Wuthering Heights and assist in the last duties to the dead.

We broke in this morning, for we heard him snorting like a horse; and there he was, laid over the settle; flaying and scalping would not have wakened him.

He would, had he dared, have fostered hate between him and the present owner of the Heights; but his dread of that owner amounted to superstition, and he confined his feelings regarding him to muttered innuendoes and private comminations.

Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going, and asked him to show her the way, finally beguiling him to accompany her.

Catherine ran wild with joy at the idea of welcoming her father back: and indulged most sanguine anticipations of the innumerable excellencies of her "real" cousin.

He was asleep in a corner, wrapped in a warm, fur-lined cloak, as if it had been winter--a pale, delicate, effeminate boy, who might have been taken for my master's younger brother, so strong was the resemblance; but there was a sickly peevishness in his aspect that Edgar Linton never had.

"Let me go to bed, then," answered the boy, shrinking from Catherine's salute; and he put up his fingers to remove incipient tears.

"I shall ask him what he wants first," I said, in considerable trepidation.

He was donned in his Sunday garments, with his most sanctimonious and sourest face; and, holding his hat in one hand and his stick in the other, he proceeded to clean his shoes on the mat.