Characters.  If the story is the study of a given situation, Markheim, who is another type of the developing character, is the central factor in the situation.  We see and interpret the situation only through the personality of Markheim himself.  Another murderer might have acted differently, even with those clamorous clocks and accusing mirrors around him, but not this murderer.  There is nothing abnormal about him, however, as a criminal.  He is thirty-six years old and through sheer weakness has gone steadily downward, but he has never before done a deed approaching this in horror or in the power of sudden self-revelation.  He sees himself now as he never saw himself before and begins to take stock of his moral assets.  They are pitifully meager, though his opportunities for character building have been good.  He has even had emotional revivals, which did not, however, issue in good deeds.  But with it all, Markheim illustrates the nobility of human nature rather than its essential depravity.  I do not doubt his complete and permanent conversion.  When the terrible last question is put to him—­or when he puts it to himself—­whether he is better now in any one particular than he was, and when he is forced to say, “No, in none!  I have gone down in all,” the moral resources of human nature itself seem to be exhausted.  But they are not.  “I see clearly what remains for me,” said Markheim, “by way of duty.”  This word, not used before, sounds a new challenge and marks the crisis of the story.  Duty can fight without calling in reserves from the past and without the vision of victory in the future.  I don’t wonder that the features of the visitant “softened with a tender triumph.”  The visitant was neither “the devil” as Markheim first thought him nor “the Saviour of men” as a recent editor pronounces him.  He is only Markheim’s old self, the self that entered the antique shop, that with fear and trembling committed the deed, and that now, half-conscious all the time of inherent falseness, urges the old arguments and tries to energize the old purposes.  It is this visitant that every man meets and overthrows when he comes to himself, when he breaks sharply with the old life and enters resolutely upon the new.]

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds.  Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge.  Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop.  At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.