David, who was
said to be the man after God's own heart, or St John, who was called
'the Beloved.' As very present seemed the day on which he made
resolutions of trying to be like them; it was in the spring, and
some one had brought in cowslips; and the scent of those flowers was
in his nostrils now, as he lay a-dying--his life ended, his battles
fought, his time for 'being good' over and gone--the opportunity,
once given in all eternity, past.

All the temptations that had beset him rose clearly before him; the
scenes themselves stood up in their solid materialism--he could have
touched the places; the people, the thoughts, the arguments that
Satan had urged in behalf of sin, were reproduced with the vividness
of a present time. And he knew that the thoughts were illusions, the
arguments false and hollow; for in that hour came the perfect vision
of the perfect truth: he saw the 'way to escape' which had come
along with the temptation; now, the strong resolve of an ardent
boyhood, with all a life before it to show the world 'what a
Christian might be'; and then the swift, terrible now, when his
naked, guilty soul shrank into the shadow of God's mercy-seat, out
of the blaze of His anger against all those who act a lie.

His mind was wandering, and he plucked it back. Was this death in
very deed? He tried to grasp at the present, the earthly present,
fading quick away. He lay there on the bed--on Sally Dobson's bed in
the house-place, not on his accustomed pallet in the lean-to. He
knew that much. And the door was open into the still, dusk night;
and through the open casement he could hear the lapping of the waves
on the shelving shore, could see the soft gray dawn over the sea--he
knew it was over the sea--he saw what lay unseen behind the poor
walls of the cottage. And it was Sylvia who held his hand tight in
her warm, living grasp; it was his wife whose arm was thrown around
him, whose sobbing sighs shook his numbed frame from time to time.

'God bless and comfort my darling,' he said to himself. 'She knows
me now. All will be right in heaven--in the light of God's mercy.'

And then he tried to remember all that he had ever read about, God,
and all that the blessed Christ--that bringeth glad tidings of great
joy unto all people, had said of the Father, from whom He came.
Those sayings dropped like balm down upon his troubled heart and
brain. He remembered his mother, and how she had loved him; and he
was going to