You laugh at the shallow temptation?  You see the error underlying its argument so clearly,—­that to him a true life was one of full development rather than self-restraint? that he was deaf to the higher tone in a cry of voluntary suffering for truth’s sake than in the fullest flow of spontaneous harmony?  I do not plead his cause.  I only want to show you the mote in my brother’s eye:  then you can see clearly to take it out.

The money,—­there it lay on his knee, a little blotted slip of paper, nothing in itself; used to raise him out of the pit; something straight from God’s hand.  A thief!  Well, what was it to be a thief?  He met the question at last, face to face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead.  God made this money—­the fresh air, too—­for his children’s use.  He never made the difference between poor and rich.  The Something who looked down on him that moment through the cool gray sky had a kindly face, he knew,—­loved his children alike.  Oh, he knew that!

There were times when the soft floods of color in the crimson and purple flames, or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge, had somehow given him a glimpse of another world than this,—­of an infinite depth of beauty and of quiet somewhere,—­somewhere,—­a depth of quiet and rest and love.  Looking up now, it became strangely real.  The sun had sunk quite below the hills, but his last rays struck upward, touching the zenith.  The fog had risen, and the town and river were steeped in its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,—­shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver reined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light.  Wolfe’s artist-eye grew drunk with color.  The gates of that other world!  Fading, flashing before him now!  What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine, of mill-owners and mill-hands?

A consciousness of power stirred within him.  He stood up.  A man,—­he thought, stretching out his hands,—­free to work, to live, to love!  Free!  His right!  He folded the scrap of paper in his hand.  As his nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color.  Clutching it, as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of possession, he went aimlessly down the street.  It was his watch at the mill.  He need not go, need never go again, thank God!—­shaking off the thought with unspeakable loathing.