actual--that is the present phase of the
ever-changing--looked the ideal in the face; and the mirror that held
them both, shook and quivered at the discord of the faces reflected.
A kind of moral cold seemed to radiate from the object before him, and
chill him to the very bones. This could not long be endured. He fled
from the actual to the source of all the ideal--to that Saviour who, the
infinite mediator, mediates between all hopes and all positions; between
the most debased actual and the loftiest ideal; between the little
scoffer of St. Giles's and his angel that ever beholds the face of the
Father in heaven. He fell on his knees, and spoke to God, saying that
he had made this man; that the mark of his fingers was on the man's soul
somewhere. He prayed to the making Spirit to bring the man to his right
mind, to give him once more the heart of a child, to begin him yet again
at the beginning. Then at last, all the evil he had done and suffered
would but swell his gratitude to Him who had delivered him from himself
and his own deeds. Having breathed this out before the God of his life,
Falconer rose, strengthened to meet the honourable debased soul when
it should at length look forth from the dull smeared windows of those
ill-used eyes.

He felt his pulse. There was no danger from the narcotic. The coma would
pass away. Meantime he would get him to bed. When he began to undress
him a new reverence arose which overcame all disgust at the state in
which he found him. At length one sad little fact about his dress,
revealing the poverty-stricken attempt of a man to preserve the shadow
of decency, called back the waters of the far-ebbed ocean of his
feelings. At the prick of a pin the heart's blood will flow: at the
sight of--a pin it was--Robert burst into tears, and wept like a child;
the deadly cold was banished from his heart, and he not only loved, but
knew that he loved--felt the love that was there. Everything then about
the worn body and shabby garments of the man smote upon the heart of his
son, and through his very poverty he was sacred in his eyes. The human
heart awakened the filial--reversing thus the ordinary process of
Nature, who by means of the filial, when her plans are unbroken, awakes
the human; and he reproached himself bitterly for his hardness, as he
now judged his late mental condition--unfairly, I think. He soon had him
safe in bed, unconscious of the helping hands that had been busy about
him in