e! I was but a servant and a minister. What power could I
have over them, but that they were bound in the bonds of their sin, and
delivered to me!'

More than forty years had passed over the grey head of this determined
woman, since the time she recalled. More than forty years of strife
and struggle with the whisper that, by whatever name she called her
vindictive pride and rage, nothing through all eternity could change
their nature. Yet, gone those more than forty years, and come this
Nemesis now looking her in the face, she still abided by her old
impiety--still reversed the order of Creation, and breathed her own
breath into a clay image of her Creator. Verily, verily, travellers have
seen many monstrous idols in many countries; but no human eyes have ever
seen more daring, gross, and shocking images of the Divine nature than
we creatures of the dust make in our own likenesses, of our own bad
passions.

'When I forced him to give her up to me, by her name and place of
abode,' she went on in her torrent of indignation and defence; 'when I
accused her, and she fell hiding her face at my feet, was it my injury
that I asserted, were they my reproaches that I poured upon her? Those
who were appointed of old to go to wicked kings and accuse them--were
they not ministers and servants? And had not I, unworthy and far-removed
from them, sin to denounce? When she pleaded to me her youth, and his
wretched and hard life (that was her phrase for the virtuous training he
had belied), and the desecrated ceremony of marriage there had
secretly been between them, and the terrors of want and shame that had
overwhelmed them both when I was first appointed to be the instrument of
their punishment, and the love (for she said the word to me, down at my
feet) in which she had abandoned him and left him to me, was it my enemy
that became my footstool, were they the words of my wrath that made her
shrink and quiver! Not unto me the strength be ascribed; not unto me the
wringing of the expiation!'

Many years had come and gone since she had had the free use even of
her fingers; but it was noticeable that she had already more than once
struck her clenched hand vigorously upon the table, and that when she
said these words she raised her whole arm in the air, as though it had
been a common action with her.

'And what was the repentance that was extorted from the hardness of her
heart and the blackness of her depravity? I, vindictive and imp