e for her covered its
heinousness from his eyes. His conscience had become the blind and dumb
slave of his passion. So blind and dumb had it been that it had scarcely
stirred or murmured until his sin was found out, and it was scarcely
aroused to life even yet.

In a certain sense he had been religious, having been most sedulously
trained in religion from his earliest consciousness. He had accepted the
ordinary teachings of our nineteenth-century Christianity. His place in
church, beside his mother or his wife, had seldom been empty, and
several times in the year he had knelt with them at the Lord's table,
and taken the Lord's Supper, feeling himself distinctly a more religious
man than usual on such occasions. No man had ever heard him utter a
profane word, nor had he transgressed any of the outward rules of a
religious life. It is true he had never made a vehement and
extraordinary profession of piety, such as some men do; but there was
not a person in Riversborough who would not have spoken of him as a
good churchman and a Christian. While he had been gradually
appropriating Mr. Clifford's money and the hard-earned savings of poorer
men confided to him, he had felt no qualm of conscience in giving
liberally to many a religious and philanthropic object, contributing
such sums as figure well in a subscription list; though it was generally
his wife's name that figured there. He had never taken up a subscription
list without glancing first for that beloved name, Mrs. Roland Sefton.

In those days he had never doubted that he was a Christian. So far as he
knew, so far as words could teach him, he was living a Christian life.
Did he not believe in God, the Father Almighty? Yes, as fully as those
who lived about him. Had he not followed Christ? As closely as the mass
of people who call themselves Christians. Nay, more than most of them.
Not as much as his mother perhaps, in her simple, devout faith. But then
religion is always a different thing with women than with men, a fairer
and more delicate thing, wearing a finer bloom and gloss, which does not
wear well in a work-a-day world such as he did battle in. But if he had
not lived a Christian life, what man in Riversborough had done so,
except a few fanatics?

But his religion had been powerless to keep him from falling into subtle
temptations, and into a crime so heinous in the sight of his fellow-men
that it was only to be expiated by the loss of character, the loss of