is locket, and her only soul was in his heart, far
more surely than in this woman who had forgotten her.

Death was a hopeful, cheerful state compared to that nameless
nothingness that was her portion. For had she been dead, he could still
have loved her soul; but now she had none. The soul that once she had,
and, if she had then died, might have kept, had been forfeited by living
on, and had passed to this woman, and would from her pass on further
till finally fixed and vested in the decrepitude of age by death. So,
then, it was death and not life that secured the soul, and his sweet
Ida had none because she had not died in time. Ah! had not he heard
somewhere that the soul is immortal and never dies? Where, then, was
Ida's? She had disappeared utterly out of the universe. She had been
transformed, destroyed, swallowed up in this woman, a living sepulchre,
more cruel than the grave, for it devoured the soul as well as the
body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted of
meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an immortality
worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life, after all its
beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless away? To be aught
but a mockery, immortality must be as manifold as the manifold phases of
life. Since life devours so many souls, why suppose death will spare the
last one?

But he would contend with destiny. Painters should multiply the face in
his locket. He would immortalize her in a poem. He would constantly keep
the lamp trimmed and burning before her shrine in his heart. She should
live in spite of the woman.

But he could now never make amends to her for the suffering his cruel,
neglectful youth had caused her. He had scarcely realized before how
much the longing to make good that wrong had influenced bis quest of
her. Tears of remorse for an unatonable crime gathered in his eyes. He
might, indeed, enrich this woman, or educate her children, or pension
her husband; but that would be no atonement to Ida.

And then, as if to intensify that remorse by showing still more clearly
the impossibility of atonement, it flashed on him that he who loved Ida
was not the one to atone for an offense of which he would be incapable,
which had been committed by one who despised her love. Justice was a
meaningless word, and amends were never possible, nor can men ever make
atonement; for, ere the debt is paid, the atonement made, one who is not
the