of his murdered sweetheart, which even ascended the pulpit
stairs behind him, and pattered furtively about him when he knelt to
pray for pardon of his sin. He filled his mind with visionary terrors,
but they seemed remote or even ridiculous to him, and he said to himself
that they were the clever inventions of imaginative people. They were
worked up. They were moulded into conventional stories. They pleased the
magazines of their time. He alone was really haunted of all men in the
world, so far as he knew. And then a great and greedy desire came upon
him to meet some other man in a like case, to hear from live lips the
true and undecorated history of a despair like his own, one of those
bald and terse narratives which pierce the imagination of the hearer
like a sword, with no tinselled scabbard of exaggeration and of lies. He
wondered whether upon the earth a man walked in a darkness similar to
that which fell round him like a veil. He wondered whether he was
unique, even as he felt. Sometimes he caught himself looking furtively
at a harmless stranger, a bright girl tanned by the sea, or a lad just
back from a fishing excursion to Raynor's Bay, and saying to himself low
and drearily: "Does any spirit trouble you, I wonder? Does any spirit
cry to you in the night?" But neither his work, his excursions of the
imagination, nor the presence of Lily in his house, availed to cleanse
the life of Maurice from the stain of sound, that ever widened and
spread upon it. He fought for freedom for a while, strenuously, with all
his heart and soul. But the lost battle left him with his energies
exhausted, his courage broken. One night he said to Lily:

"Do you know all I have been doing since we came back here?"

"Yes, Maurice, I know."

"And that it has all been in vain," he said, with a passion of
bitterness that he could not try to conceal.

"That too I understand, Maurice--I knew it would be in vain."

He looked at her almost as at an enemy, for his heart was so full of
misery, his mind was so worn with weariness, that he began to lose the
true appreciation of human relations, and to confuse the beauty near him
with the ugliness that companioned him so closely.

"You knew it? What do you mean?" he said. "How could you know it?"

"I felt it, Maurice; do not try any longer to work out alone your own
redemption."

"You can say that to me?"

"Yes, for I believe that it is useless--you will fail."

He set his lips together