y or the other wouldn't make any more difference than a
snowflake in hell. I owe you something anyway--God knows!--for
supplying the model that sent you to perdition. If you hadn't paid me
the ingenuous compliment of unremitting imitation, you'd have been a
sight better off. . . . And you're going to marry the white little
girl with the beautiful eyes and the wonderful, sweet forgiving decency
of heart, and bring up a crowd of God-fearing youngsters, make over the
old doctor's farm for him--and likely his life--and begin afresh.
That's all I ask. Now to bed with you."

Wherry wrung Carl's hand, and after a passionate, incoherent storm of
gratitude stumbled blindly from the room.

The old house grew very quiet. Presently to the crackle of the fire
and the wild noise of the wind outside was added the soft and
melancholy lilt of a flute. There was no mockery or impudence in the
strain to-night. It was curiously of a piece with the creaking
loneliness of the ancient farmhouse and so soft at times that the clash
of the frozen branches against the house engulfed it utterly.

Sombre, swayed by a surge of deep depression, the flutist lay back in
his chair by the fire, piping moodily upon the friend he always carried
in his pocket. To-morrow Dick would be off to the girl in Vermont--

The clock struck twelve. The rural world was wrapped in slumber.
Above-stairs Dick was sleeping the sound, dreamless sleep of healthy
weariness, and most likely dreaming of the girl by the brook. A
cleansed body and a cleansed mind, thank God! So had he slept for
nights while the inexorable master of his days, with no companion but
his flute, drank and drank until dawn, climbing up to bed at
cockcrow--sometimes drunk and morose, sometimes a grim and conscious
master of the bottle.

Carl had been drinking wildly, heavily for months. That in
flagellating Wherry's body day by day he spared not himself, was
characteristic of the man and of his will. That he preached and
dragged a man from the depths of hell by day and deliberately descended
into infernal abysses by night, was but another revelation of the wild,
inconsistent humors which tore his soul, Youth and indomitable physique
gave him as yet clear eyes and muscles of iron, for all he abused them,
but the humors of his soul from day to day grew blacker.

Kronberg, a new servant Carl had brought with him to the Glade for
personal attendance, presently brought in his nightly tray