It was too late now: why need he think
of what might have been? Yet he did think of it through the long
winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come, or
of her, growing more tender and more bitter. Do you wonder at
the remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he
had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face
with God and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity
that the life you have lived stands out before you in the
dreadful bareness in which God sees it,--as you shall see it some
day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in
their true light then. Yet, coming back to life again, he held
whatever resolve he had reached down there with his old iron
will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the false life
before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late now to
atone for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by that
resolve, to go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it
might. Whatever the resolve was, it did not still the gnawing
hunger in his heart that night, which every trifle made more
fresh and strong.
There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled
up with bits of cloth and leather out of which she was
manufacturing Christmas gifts; a pair of great woollen socks,
which one of the sisters had told him privately Lois meant for
him, lying on top. As with all of her people, Christmas was the
great day of the year to her.
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