for her help that night,--for
her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late. He went over all
the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered the money
that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of it with a curse,
getting up and pacing the floor of the narrow room, slowly and quietly.
Looking out into the still starlight and the quaint garden, he tried to
fancy this woman as he knew her, after the restless power of her soul
should have been chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty. He
fancied her old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been
what might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this
for money,--money!

It was of no use to repent of it now. He had frozen the love out of
her heart, long ago. He remembered (all that he did remember of the
blank night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white, worn-out
face looking down at him; that she did not touch him; and that, when
one of the sisters told her she might take her place, and sponge his
forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no right to do it, that he was no
friend of hers. He saw and heard that, unconscious to all else; he
would have known it, if he had been dead, lying there. It was too late
now: why need he think of what might have been? Yet he did think of it
through the long winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life
to come, or of her, growing more tender and more bitter. Do you wonder
at the remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had
done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God
and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life
you have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which
God sees it,--as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money,
and hate, and love will stand in their true light then. Yet, coming
back to life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached down there
with his old iron will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the
false life before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late
now to atone for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by
that resolve, to go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it
might. Whatever the resolve was, it did not still the gnawing hunger
in his heart that night, which every trifle made more fresh and strong.

There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled up with
bits of cloth and le