me. If ever he had denied to his own soul this Margaret,
called her alien or foreign, he called her now, when it was too late, to
her rightful place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest
depths of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,--for
her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late. He went over all the
years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered the money
that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of it with a curse,
pacing the floor of the narrow room, slowly and quietly. Looking out
into the still starlight and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this
woman as he knew her, after the restless power of her soul should have
been chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty. He fancied her
old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been----what
might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this for
money,--money!

It was of no use to repent of it now. He had frozen the love out of her
heart, long ago. He remembered (all that he did remember of the blank
night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white, worn-out face
looking down at him; that she did not touch him; and that, when, one of
the sisters told her she might take her place, and sponge his forehead,
she said, bitterly, she had no right to do it, that he was no friend
of hers. He saw and heard that, unconscious to all else; he would have
known it, if he had been dead, lying there. It was too late now: why
need he think of what might have been? Yet he did think of it through
the long winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come,
or of her, growing more tender and more bitter. Do you wonder at the
remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had done,
through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God and
death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life you
have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which God
sees it,--as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money, and
hate, and love will stand in their true light then. Yet, coming back to
life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached down there with his
old iron will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the false life
before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late now to atone
for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by that resolve, to
go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it might. Whatever t