m, she uttered a feeble wail of "_Baby!_" and,
turning her head, did not look at him again. Then, first, Tom's
conscience gave him a sharp sting.

He was far from well. The careless and in many respects dissolute life
he had been leading had more than begun to tell on a constitution by no
means strong, but he had never become aware of his weakness nor had
ever felt really ill until now.

But that sting, although the first sharp one, was not his first warning
of a waking conscience. Ever since he took his place at his wife's
bedside, he had been fighting off the conviction that he was a brute.
He would not, he could not believe it. What! Tom Helmer, the fine,
indubitable fellow! such as he had always known himself!--he to cower
before his own consciousness as a man unworthy, and greatly to be
despised! The chaos was come again! And, verily, chaos was there, but
not by any means newly come. And, moreover, when chaos begins to be
conscious of itself, then is the dawn of an ordered world at hand. Nay,
the creation of it is already begun, and the pangs of the waking
conscience are the prophecy of the new birth.

With that pitiful cry of his wife after her lost child, disbelief in
himself got within the lines of his defense; he could do no more, and
began to loathe that conscious self which had hitherto been his pride.

Whatever the effect of illness may be upon the temper of some, it is
most certainly an ally of the conscience. All pains, indeed, and all
sorrows, all demons, yea, and all sins themselves under the suffering
care of the highest minister, are but the ministers of truth and
righteousness. I never came to know the condition of such as seemed
exceptionally afflicted but I seemed to see reason for their
affliction, either in exceptional faultiness of character or the
greatness of the good it was doing them.

But conscience reacts on the body--for sickness until it is obeyed, for
health thereafter. The moment conscience spoke thus plainly to Tom, the
little that was left of his physical endurance gave way, his illness
got the upper hand, and he took to his bed--all he could have for bed,
that is--namely, the sofa in the sitting-room, widened out with chairs,
and a mattress over all. There he lay, and their landlady had enough to
do. Not that either of her patients was exacting; they were both too
ill and miserable for that. It is the self-pitiful, self-coddling
invalid that is exacting. Such, I suspect, require