The House of The Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 13 Page 48

unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice.

“Best touch her” said Matthew Maule “Shake the girl, and roughly, too! My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and plane, — else I might help you!”

Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heart-throb in the kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it.

Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which, the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alice — whose figure, though flexible, had been wholly impassive —