lence of one who is above
you in station--but I bore with that. I implored him to deal well with
the girl, for what might be only a pastime of an idle hour with him
might be the breaking of her heart. For I never had a thought of her
truth, or that the worst of harm could come to her--it was only the
unhappiness to her heart I feared. But when I asked him when he
intended to marry her his laughter galled me so that I lost my temper
and told him that I would not stand by and see her life made unhappy.
Then he grew angry too, and in his anger said such cruel things of her
that then and there I swore he should not live to do her harm. God
knows how it came about, for in such moments of passion it is hard to
remember the steps from a word to a blow, but I found myself standing
over his dead body, with my hands crimson with the blood that welled
from his torn throat. We were alone and he was a stranger, with none
of his kin to seek for him and murder does not always out--not all at
once. His bones may be whitening still, for all I know, in the pool of
the river where I left him. No one suspected his absence, or why it
was, except my poor Mabel, and she dared not speak. But it was all in
vain, for when I came back again after an absence of months--for I
could not live in the place--I learned that her shame had come and
that she had died in it. Hitherto I had been borne up by the thought
that my ill deed had saved her future, but now, when I learned that I
had been too late, and that my poor love was smirched with that man's
sin, I fled away with the sense of my useless guilt upon me more
heavily than I could bear. Ah! sir, you that have not done such a sin
don't know what it is to carry it with you. You may think that custom
makes it easy to you, but it is not so. It grows and grows with every
hour, till it becomes intolerable, and with it growing, too, the
feeling that you must for ever stand outside Heaven. You don't know
what that means, and I pray God that you never may. Ordinary men, to
whom all things are possible, don't often, if ever, think of Heaven.
It is a name, and nothing more, and they are content to wait and let
things be, but to those who are doomed to be shut out for ever you
cannot think what it means, you cannot guess or measure the terrible
endless longing to see the gates opened, and to be able to join the
white figures within.

'And this brings me to my dream. It seemed that the portal was before
me, wi