moment of failure. Was it true,
what Sophia had said, that he had sold his birthright for a little
paltry prosperity? He thought more highly of her discrimination than any
one else would have done, because he loved her. What had she seen in him
to make her use that form of accusation? And if it was true, was there
for him no place of repentance?

Then he remembered the purer air of the dark mountaintop. There he had
seen many from his own little cure of souls who were shaken by the
madman's fervour as _he_ had never been able to move them by precept or
example. There he, too, had seen, with sight borrowed from the eyes of
the enthusiast, the enthusiast's Lord, seen Him the more readily because
there had been times in his life when he had not needed another to show
him the loveliness that exceeds all other loveliness. He was versed in
the chronicle of the days when the power of God wrought wonders by
devoted men, and he asked himself with whom this power had been working
here of late--with him, the priest, or with this wandering fool, out of
whose lips it would seem that praise was ordained. He looked back to
divers hours when he had given himself wholly to the love of God, and to
the long reaches of time between them, in which he had not cast away the
muck-rake, but had trailed it after him with one hand as he walked
forward, looking to the angel and the crown. He seemed to see St. Peter
pointing to the life all which he had professed to devote while he had
kept back part; and St. Peter said, "Whiles it remained, was it not
thine own? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God."

There was for him the choice that is given to every man in this sort of
pain, the choice between dulling his mind to the pain, letting it pass
from him as he holds on his way (and God knows it passes easily), or
clasping it as the higher good. Perhaps this man would not have been
wiser than many other men in his choice had he not looked at the
gathering of his muck-rake and in that found no comfort. Since a woman
had called this prosperity paltry, it seemed less substantial in his own
eyes; but, paltry or worthy, he believed that it was in the power of his
younger brother to reverse that prosperity, and he felt neither brave
enough to face this misfortune nor bad enough to tamper with that
brother's crude ideals for the sake of his own gain. From the length of
his own experience, from the present weariness of his soul, he looked
upon Alec more