“What I may be,” returned the other, “can not affect the service I propose to render you.”

“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does!  Be helped by you?  No, never; not by you!  You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!”

“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness.  “I know you to the soul.”

“Know me!” cried Markheim.  “Who can do so?  My life is but a travesty and slander on myself.  I have lived to belie my nature.  All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them.  You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak.  If they had their own control—­if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints!  I am worse than most; my self is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God.  But, had I the time, I could disclose myself.”

“To me?” inquired the visitant.

“To you before all,” returned the murderer.  “I supposed you were intelligent.  I thought—­since you exist—­you would prove a reader of the heart.  And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts!  Think of it; my acts!  I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—­the giants of circumstance.  And you would judge me by my acts!  But can you not look within?  Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me?  Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded?  Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—­the unwilling sinner?”

“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards me not.  These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction.  But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding toward you through the Christmas streets!  Shall I help you; I, who know all?  Shall I tell you where to find the money?”

“For what price?” asked Markheim.

“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.  “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse.  It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil.”

“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.