nds and society and that
sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I have not taken this step
without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty God."

I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly
about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my sense of taste. I
stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.

"You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the
circle of her life," said I.

"The best of all reasons," he replied, caressing a brown whisker,
"namely, that I am a Christian."

I liked him less and less.

"Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these
years?"

"I deserve the scoff," said he: "Those were days of sin. I deserve every
humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace
of God. I found it at three o'clock in the afternoon on the eighth of
January, eighteen hundred and--"

"Never mind the year," I interrupted.

My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with
nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw knavery in the
whites of his upturned eyes.

"I should be glad," I continued quickly, "if you would come to the point
of the conversation you desire to have with me. I presume it concerns
Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has
found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment
and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor.
You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so--and I can't see
what the grace of God has to do with it."

He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward gesture of
an inspired English prophet.

"But it has everything to do with it! It is the beginning and end, core
and kernel, root and branch of the matter. It is the grace of God that
checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of God
that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of
God that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace
of God that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman
I have wronged. The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ,
which came upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it
did upon Saul of Tarsus. The grace of God has everything to do with it."

"Mr. Mainwaring," said I, "such talk is either blasphemous or--"

He did not allow me to stat