true kiss of real affection, he remembered it now, when it was too late, with bitterness such as wrings a man’s heart but once in a lifetime.  If ever he had denied to his own soul this Margaret, called her alien or foreign, he called her now, when it was too late, to her rightful place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest depths of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,—­for her, a part of himself,—­now, when it was too late.  He went over all the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered the money that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of it with a curse, pacing the floor of the narrow room, slowly and quietly.  Looking out into the still starlight and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this woman as he knew her, after the restless power of her soul should have been chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty.  He fancied her old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been——­what might they not have been, together?  And he had driven her to this for money,—­money!

It was of no use to repent of it now.  He had frozen the love out of her heart, long ago.  He remembered (all that he did remember of the blank night after he was hurt) that he had seen her white, worn-out face looking down at him; that she did not touch him; and that, when, one of the sisters told her she might take her place, and sponge his forehead, she said, bitterly, she had no right to do it, that he was no friend of hers.  He saw and heard that, unconscious to all else; he would have known it, if he had been dead, lying there.  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.