ignorance, of the will that desired to will the good, came over him at
the moment and he could have cried aloud in his terror because his soul
had reached the boundaries between its angel and its devil. In his
decision he appeared to himself to stand absolutely solitary and
detached--put away from all help from humanity or from human creeds. The
law courts told him nothing, nor did religion--then, at the instant of
his sharpest despair of knowledge, there came back to him, as in a
vision of light, the scene two thousand years ago in Bethany at the
house of Simon the leper. The people passing about him in the street
became suddenly but shadows, even the noise of the cars no longer broke
in confusion upon his ears; and in the midst of the silence in which he
stood, he heard the Voice as Simon had heard it then: "I have somewhat
to say unto thee."

A moment afterward the vision was gone, and he looked round him dazed by
the flashing of the lights. "What does it matter about my life which is
almost over?" he asked. "I will help Connie, so far as I have strength,
to bear her sin against me--and as for the rest it is nothing to me any
more." Then, as the resolution took shape in his mind, he was conscious
of a feeling of restfulness, of a relief so profound that it pervaded
him to the smallest fibre of his being. The whole situation had changed
at the instant; his offended honour was no longer offended, nor was his
righteous anger still righteous. Though the naked truth must face him in
all its brutishness, he knew, from the feeling within him, that by an
act of thought, which was not an act, he had drawn the sting of the
poisoned arrow from his wound. Not only had the bitterness passed from
his shame, but there had come, with the relinquishment of the idea of
personal wrong, a swift rush of exaltation, like a strong wind, through
his soul. Almost unconsciously he had yielded his will into the hands of
God, and immediately, as in the prophecy "all these things had been
added" unto the rest.

Turning at once he walked rapidly in the direction of his house, while a
clock in a tower across the way pointed to the stroke of nine o'clock.
The bodily exertion had begun to wear upon him during the last few
minutes. His feet ached and there was a bruised feeling in all his
muscles. When he came at last to his own door the sensation of fatigue
had blotted out the acuteness of his perceptions.

The lights were blazing in the hall; th