compunction

Compunction? It was indeed a very off-hand way of treating a brother come to stay for the first time in fifteen years.

But my father has this very sum, five thousand pounds, and, as I tell him, I owe him so much that I have no compunction about owing him more."

By these and the like declarations, he extorted some compunction from Tom, in which that youth was not over-sincere; for he really meditated some return for all the smarting favours he had received at the hands of the pedagogue.

The words of scorn, the refusal to shake hands, the mastery asserted over him in their last conversation in the Hermitage--above all, the sense of having been knocked down, to which a man does not very well reconcile himself, even under the most heroic circumstances--pressed on him with a galling pain which was stronger than compunction. Arthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm!

With a movement of compunction as new and strange to him as everything else within the last hour, he started from his chair and went close up to Jem, looking at him as if he wanted to assure himself of the expression in his face.

She is decorated all over with beads and bracelets and embroidered dandelions; but her principal decoration consists of the softest little gray eyes in the world, which rest upon you with a profundity of confidence--a confidence that I really feel some compunction in betraying.

Will the creature feel any compunction at tyrannizing over them?

Sparsit saw James Harthouse come and go; she heard of him here and there; she saw the changes of the face he had studied; she, too, remarked to a nicety how and when it clouded, how and when it cleared; she kept her black eyes wide open, with no touch of pity, with no touch of compunction, all absorbed in interest.

And she did sleep; so soundly, so healthfully, that old Lizette without compunction stole softly away, to creep back through the moonlit fields to her own cabin in the new quarters.

Emma wished he would be less pointed, yet could not help being amused; and when on glancing her eye towards Jane Fairfax she caught the remains of a smile, when she saw that with all the deep blush of consciousness, there had been a smile of secret delight, she had less scruple in the amusement, and much less compunction with respect to her.This amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax was apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings.

"Item, I entreat the aforesaid gentlemen my executors, that, if any happy chance should lead them to discover the author who is said to have written a history now going about under the title of 'Second Part of the Achievements of Don Quixote of La Mancha,' they beg of him on my behalf as earnestly as they can to forgive me for having been, without intending it, the cause of his writing so many and such monstrous absurdities as he has written in it; for I am leaving the world with a feeling of compunction at having provoked him to write them."

I could take a human life, if necessary, with far less compunction than that of a poor, unreasoning, irresponsible brute.