nearly always they
fall back in the end upon the same worn and respectable category.

"I confess to the sin of pride," he pronounced slowly. "And to good
deeds and kind acts undone; to moments of harshness and impatience--"

"Mista Matee Snow confessee?" Yen Sin shook a weary protest at the
cheater wasting the precious moments with words. Mate Snow lifted his
eyes, and I saw his face whiten and a pearl of sweat form on his
forehead. A hush filled the close cave of light, a waiting silence,
oppressive and struck with a new expectancy. Little sounds on the dock
above became important--young Gilman Pilot's voice, cautioning: "Here,
best take my hand on that ladder, Mr. Malden. Last rung's carried away."

It was curious to see Mate Snow's face at that; it was as if one read
the moving history of years in it as he leaned over the counter and
touched the dying man's breast with a passion strange in him.

"I will tell you how wicked I am, Yen Sin. Three years ago I did Ginny
Silva out of seventy dollars wages in the bogs; and if he's here tonight
I'll pay him the last cent of it. And--and--" He appealed for mercy to
the Chinaman's unshaken eyes. Then, hearing the minister on the deck
behind, he cast in the desperate sop of truth. "And--_and I have coveted
my neighbor's wife_!"

It was now that Minister Malden cried from the doorway: "That is
nothing, Yen Sin--_nothing_--when you think of _me_!"

You may laugh. But just then, in that rocking death-chamber, with the
sea and the dark and the wind, no one laughed. Except Yen Sin, perhaps;
he may have smiled, though the mask of his features did not move.
Minister Malden stepped into the room, and his face was like new ivory.

"Look at me! I have wanted to bring your soul to Christ before I died.
That is white, but all the rest of me is black. I have lived a lie; I
have broken a law of God; to cover that I have broken another,
another--"

His voice hung in the air, filled with a strange horror of itself. The
Chinaman fingered his collars. Without our consent or our understanding,
he had done the thing which had so shocked us when he said it with his
lips; the heathen sat in judgment, weighing the sins of our little
world.

"Yes?" he seemed to murmur. "And then?"

The minister's eyes widened; pain lifted him on his toes.

"I am an adulterer," he cried. "And my child is a--a--bastard. Her
mother's husband, Joshua Gibbs, didn't go down with his vessel after
all. He was ali