had found a
woman's tenderness to lean upon, and, as she ministered to him--this
humble, shrinking creature he had once so cordially despised--the first
drop of balm fell upon his sore.

Meanwhile, in another cottage a few yards away, Mr. Drew was wrestling
with Isaac. In his own opinion, he met with small success. The man
who had refused his wife mercy shrank, with a kind of horror, from
talking of the Divine mercy. Isaac Costrell's was a strange and
groping soul. But those misjudged him who called him a hypocrite.

Yet in truth, during the years that followed, whenever he was not under
the influence of recurrent attacks of melancholia, Isaac did again
derive much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasements of
religion. No human life would be possible if there were not forces in
and round man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches
that he himself makes. Misery provokes pity; despair throws itself on
a Divine tenderness. And for those who have the "grace" of faith, in
the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this
various world--in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the
tremulous, yet undying, hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the
vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them--in
these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient
under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be "the
falls of princes" or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie
Costrell to her end.

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