ng
patience--it was that that damned him more than all else to his hell of
remorse.

At last came the end. One day Sandy went to New Harbor City to buy
leather for cobbling, and there his devil, for no apparent reason at
all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing
but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at
last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved,
blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and
night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling
weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all
the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. He reached there about
five o'clock, and in the still gray of the early dawning. Only a few
people were stirring in the streets, and as he slunk along close to the
houses, those whom he met turned and looked after him. No one spoke to
him or stopped him, as might possibly have been done had he come home at
a later hour. Every shred and filament of his poor remorseful heart and
soul longed for home and the comfort that his wife alone could give him,
and yet at the last corner he stopped for a quaking moment or so in the
face of the terror of her unreproachful patience. Then he turned the
corner--

Not a sign of his house was to be seen--nothing but an empty, gaping
blackness where it had stood before. _It had been burned to the ground!_

Why is it that God's curse rests very often and most heavily upon the
misfortunate? Why is it that He should crush the reeds that are bruised
beneath His heel? Why is it that He should seem so often to choose the
broken heart to grind to powder?

Sandy's wife had been burned to death in the fire!

From that moment Sandy Graff was lost, utterly and entirely lost. God,
for His terrible purposes, had taken away the one last thread that bound
the drowning soul to anything of decency and cleanliness. Now his devil
and he no longer struggled together; they walked hand in hand. He was
without love, without hope, without one iota that might bring a flicker
of light into the midnight gloom of his despairing soul.

After the first dreadful blast of his sorrow and despair had burned
itself out, he disappeared, no one knew whither. A little over a month
passed, and then he suddenly appeared again, drunken, maudlin, tearful.
Again he disappeared, again he reappeared, a little deeper sunken, a
little more abased, and