he curse has not come without a
cause. For she is Tardrew's daughter.

But whither have we got? How long has the cholera been in Aberalva? Five
days, five minutes, or five years? How many suns have risen and set
since Frank Headley put into his bosom Valencia's pledge!

It would be hard for him to tell; and hard for many more: for all the
days have passed as in a fever dream. To cowards the time has seemed
endless; and every moment, ere their term shall come, an age of terror,
of self-reproach, of superstitious prayers, and cries, which are not
repentance. And to some cowards, too, the days have seemed but as a
moment; for they have been drunk day and night.

Strange and hideous, yet true.

It has now become a mere commonplace, the strange power which great
crises, pestilences, famines, revolutions, invasions, have to call out
in their highest power, for evil and for good alike, the passions and
virtues of man; how, during their stay, the most desperate recklessness,
the most ferocious crime, side by side with the most heroic and
unexpected virtue, are followed generally by a collapse and a moral
death, alike of virtue and of vice. We should explain this now-a-days,
and not ill, by saying that these crises put the human mind into a state
of exaltation: but the truest explanation, after all, lies in the old
Bible belief, that in these times there goes abroad the unquenchable
fire of God, literally kindling up all men's hearts to the highest
activity, and showing, by the light of their own strange deeds, the
inmost recesses of their spirits, till those spirits burn down again,
self-consumed, while the chaff and stubble are left as ashes, not
valueless after all, as manure for some future crop; and the pure gold,
if gold there be, alone remains behind.

Even so it was in Aberalva during that fearful week. The drunkards drank
more; the swearers swore more than ever; the unjust shopkeeper clutched
more greedily than ever at the last few scraps of mean gain which
remained for him this side the grave; the selfish wrapped themselves up
more brutally than ever in selfishness; the shameless woman mingled
desperate debauchery with fits of frantic superstition; and all base
souls cried out together, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!"

But many a brave man and many a weary woman possessed their souls in
patience, and worked on, and found that as their day their strength
should be. And to them the days seemed short i