and manhood, and he was still not
old, and still might win the favour of women, and see his children
laugh--if he went back to the old homestead, and the old safe ways of
his fathers. And the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a
virgin's breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by
reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But he had
no pity on himself.

"My soul for his," he had said; and he cleaved to his word and kept it.

In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less so to himself.

He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed out the natural
evil of him and denied the desires of the flesh, and changed his very
nature to do good by Pippa's son: and it had all been of no use; it had
all been spent in vain, as drowning seamen's cries for help are spent on
angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow God's will and to
drive the tempter from him, for the boy's sake; and it had all been of
no avail. Through the long score of years his vain sacrifices echoed
dully by him as a dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.

Perhaps it was not enough.

Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy's soul by the utter
surrender and eternal ruin of his own--perhaps. After all it was a poor
love which balanced cost; a meek, mean love which would not dare to take
guilt upon it for the thing it cherished.

To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; without aught of those
palliatives with which the cultured and philosophic temper can streak it
smooth and paint its soft excuse, and trace it back to influence or
insanity. To him sin was a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which being
embraced dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, downward and downward
into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. To him the
depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in
the visions of Orgagna.

Yet he was willing to say, "Evil, be thou my good!" if by such evil he
could break the bonds of passion from the life of Pippa's son.

He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at once the tyrants
and the martyrs of the world.

"Leave him to me," he had said, and then the strength and weakness, and
ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance of his nature leaped to their
height, and nerved him with deadly passion.

"There is but one way," he said to himself;--there was but one way to
cut the cords of this hid