had a thin, meek pipe. But the
discourse was in a strain of feverish excitement, a spirit of hard
intolerance, a tone of unrelenting judgment, that would have befitted
the gigantic figure and thunderous accents of the monk Jerome.

"There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is
death." This was the text, twenty times repeated. Men talked of the
rights of conscience, as if conscience were God's law. They babbled of
toleration, as if any heresy were to be endured, if only it were
believed. Conscience! It was the slave of Circumstance. Toleration! It
was the watchword at the gate of hell.

Hugh Ritson listened with a vague consciousness, his eyes fixed
alternately on the nun with the drooping coif and on the fair, upturned
face beside her. At last a word struck him, and made his whole soul to
vibrate. Men, women, the great mute throng, pillars, arches, windows of
figured saints, altar aflame with candles, the surpliced choir, and the
pale, thin face with the burning eyes in the pulpit above--all vanished
in an instant.

What was true, said the preacher, in the realm of thought, could not be
false in the world of life. Men did evil deeds, and justified them to
their own enslaved minds. No way so dark but it had appeared to be the
path of light; none so far wrong but it had seemed to be right. Let man
beware of the lie that he told to his own heart. The end thereof is
death.

Staring from a bloodless face, Hugh Ritson reeled a step backward, and
then clung with a trembling hand to the pillar against which he had
leaned. The harsh scrape of his foot was heard over the hushed church,
and here and there a neck was craned in his direction. His emotion was
gone in an instant. A light curl of the hard lip told that the angel
within him had once again been conquered.

The sermon ended with a rapturous declaration of the immutability of
God's law, and the eternal destinies of man. The world was full of
change, but man, who seemed to change most, changed least. The stars
that hung above had seen the beginning and the end of ages. Before man
was, they were. The old river that flowed past the old city that night
had flowed there centuries ago, and generations of men had lived and
died in joy and sorrow, and still the same waters washed the same
shore. But the stars that measure time itself, and the sea that recorded
it, would vanish away, and man should be when time would be no more.
"They shall perish, but