But he carries back with him to his fish-heaps a little invisible somewhat which he did not bring; and ere nightfall he is dead hideously; he, his wife, his son:--and now the Beers are down again, and the whole neighbourhood of Treluddra's house is wild with disgusting agony.
Now the fiend is hovering round the fish-curing houses: but turns back, disgusted with the pure scent of the tan-yard, where not hides, but nets are barked; skips on board of a brig in the quay-pool; and a poor collier's 'prentice dies, and goes to his own place.

What harm has he done?
Is it his sin that, ill-fed and well-beaten daily, he has been left to sleep on board, just opposite the sewer's mouth, in a berth some four feet long by two feet high and broad?
Or is it that poor girl's sin who was just now in Heale's shop, talking to Miss Heale safe and sound, that she is carried back into it, in half-an-hour's time, fainting, shrieking?
One must draw a veil over the too hideous details.
No, not her fault: but there, at least, the curse has not come without a cause.

For she is Tardrew's daughter.
But whither have we got?
How long has the cholera been in Aberalva?
Five days, five minutes, or five years?
How many suns have risen and set since Frank Headley put into his bosom Valencia's pledge! It would be hard for him to tell; and hard for many more: for all the days have passed as in a fever dream.

To cowards the time has seemed endless; and every moment, ere their term shall come, an age of terror, of self-reproach, of superstitious prayers, and cries, which are not repentance.

And to some cowards, too, the days have seemed but as a moment; for they have been drunk day and night.
Strange and hideous, yet true.
It has now become a mere commonplace, the strange power which great crises, pestilences, famines, revolutions, invasions, have to call out in their highest power, for evil and for good alike, the passions and virtues of man; how, during their stay, the most desperate recklessness, the most ferocious crime, side by side with the most heroic and unexpected virtue, are followed generally by a collapse and a moral death, alike of virtue and of vice.