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The cat and the mouse in Wuthering Heights

‘You’ve made me afraid and ashamed of you,’ he continued; ‘I’ll not come here again!’

Her eyes began to glisten and her lids to twinkle.

‘And you told a deliberate untruth!’ he said.

‘I didn’t!’ she cried, recovering her speech; ‘I did nothing deliberately. Well, go, if you please – get away! And now I’ll cry – I’ll cry myself sick!’

She dropped down on her knees by a chair, and set to weeping in serious earnest. Edgar persevered in his resolution as far as the court; there he lingered. I resolved to encourage him.

‘Miss is dreadfully wayward, sir,’ I called out. ‘As bad as any marred child: you’d better be riding home, or else she will be sick, only to grieve us.’

The soft thing looked askance through the window: he possessed the power to depart as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed, or a bird half eaten. Ah, I thought, there will be no saving him: he’s doomed, and flies to his fate! And so it was: he turned abruptly, hastened into the house again, shut the door behind him; and when I went in a while after to inform them that Earnshaw had come home rabid drunk, ready to pull the whole place about our ears (his ordinary frame of mind in that condition), I saw the quarrel had merely effected a closer intimacy – had broken the outworks of youthful timidity, and enabled them to forsake the disguise of friendship, and confess themselves lovers.

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