wn life-long object is arrested, or rather
when it is snatched from your eye, your genius renounces all uses. Fame,
ever-during, was before you still, had your objects been those for which
genius is given. You muse. Heaven permits these rude words to strike
home! Guy Darrell, it is not too late! Heaven's warnings are always in
time. Reflect, with the one narrow object was fostered and fed the one
master failing of Pride. To us as Christians, or as reasoners, it is not
in this world that every duty is to find its special meed; yet by that
same mystical LAW which makes Science of Sorrow, rewards are but often
the normal effect of duties sublimely fulfilled. Out of your pride and
your one-cherished object, has there grown happiness? Has the success
which was not denied you achieved the link with posterity that your
hand, if not fettered, would long since have forged? Grant that Heaven
says 'Stubborn child, yield at last to the warnings vouchsafed to thee
by my love! From a son so favoured and strong I exact the most difficult
offering! Thou hast sacrificed much, but for ends not prescribed in my
law; sacrifice now to me the thing thou most clingest to--Pride. I make
the pang I demand purposely bitter. I twine round the offering I ask the
fibres that bleed in relaxing. What to other men would be no duty, is
duty to thee, because it entails a triumphant self-conquest, and pays
to Humanity the arrears of just dues long neglected.' Grant the hard
sacrifice made; I must think Heaven has ends for your joy even here,
when it asks you to part with the cause of your sorrows;--I must think
that your evening of life may have sunshine denied to its noon. But with
God are no bargains. A virtue, the most arduous because it must trample
down what your life has exalted as virtue, is before you; distasteful,
austere, repellant. The most inviting arguments in its favour are, that
it proffers no bribes; men would acquit you in rejecting it; judged by
our world's ordinary rule, men would be right in acquitting you. But if
on reflection you say in your heart of hearts, 'This is a virtue,' you
will follow its noiseless path up to the smile of God!"

The preacher ceased.

Darrell breathed a long sigh, rose slowly, took George's hand, pressed
it warmly in both his own, and turned quickly and silently away. He
paused in the deep recess where the gleam of the wintry sun shot through
the small casement, aslant and pale on the massive wall: opening t