Meanwhile, in another cottage a few yards away, Mr. Drew was wrestling with Isaac.  In his own opinion, he met with small success.  The man who had refused his wife mercy, shrank with a kind of horror from talking of the Divine mercy.  Isaac Costrell’s was a strange and groping soul.  But those misjudged him who called him a hypocrite.

Yet in truth, during the years that followed, whenever he was not under the influence of recurrent attacks of melancholia, Isaac did again derive much comfort from the aspirations and self-abasements of religion.  No human life would be possible if there were not forces in and round man perpetually tending to repair the wounds and breaches that he himself makes.

Misery provokes pity; despair throws itself on a Divine tenderness.  And for those who have the ‘grace’ of faith, in the broken and imperfect action of these healing powers upon this various world—­in the love of the merciful for the unhappy, in the tremulous yet undying hope that pierces even sin and remorse with the vision of some ultimate salvation from the self that breeds them—­in these powers there speaks the only voice which can make us patient under the tragedies of human fate, whether these tragedies be ‘the falls of princes’ or such meaner, narrower pains as brought poor Bessie Costrell to her end.