several minutes over one of these blurred and almost indistinguishable pictures, he began to see that the painter had intended to represent him, now in the decline of life, as stripping the clothes from the backs of three half-starved children.  “Really, this puzzles me!” quoth Mr. Smith, with the irony of conscious rectitude.  “Asking pardon of the painter, I pronounce him a fool as well as a scandalous knave.  A man of my standing in the world to be robbing little children of their clothes!  Ridiculous!”

But while he spoke Memory had searched her fatal volume and found a page which with her sad calm voice she poured into his ear.  It was not altogether inapplicable to the misty scene.  It told how Mr. Smith had been grievously tempted by many devilish sophistries, on the ground of a legal quibble, to commence a lawsuit against three orphan-children, joint-heirs to a considerable estate.  Fortunately, before he was quite decided, his claims had turned out nearly as devoid of law as justice.  As Memory ceased to read Conscience again thrust aside her mantle, and would have struck her victim with the envenomed dagger only that he struggled and clasped his hands before his heart.  Even then, however, he sustained an ugly gash.

Why should we follow Fancy through the whole series of those awful pictures?  Painted by an artist of wondrous power and terrible acquaintance with the secret soul, they embodied the ghosts of all the never-perpetrated sins that had glided through the lifetime of Mr. Smith.  And could such beings of cloudy fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment?  Be that the case or not, there is reason to believe that one truly penitential tear would have washed away each hateful picture and left the canvas white as snow.  But Mr. Smith, at a prick of Conscience too keen to be endured, bellowed aloud with impatient agony, and suddenly discovered that his three guests were gone.  There he sat alone, a silver-haired and highly-venerated old man, in the rich gloom of the crimsoned-curtained room, with no box of pictures on the table, but only a decanter of most excellent Madeira.  Yet his heart still seemed to fester with the venom of the dagger.

Nevertheless, the unfortunate old gentleman might have argued the matter with Conscience and alleged many reasons wherefore she should not smite him so pitilessly.  Were we to take up his cause, it should be somewhat in the following fashion.  A scheme of guilt, till it be put in execution, greatly resembles a train of incidents in a projected tale.  The latter, in order to produce a sense of reality in the reader’s mind, must be conceived with such proportionate strength by the author as to seem in the glow of fancy more like truth, past, present or to come, than purely fiction.  The prospective sinner, on the other hand, weaves his plot of crime, but seldom or never feels a perfect certainty that it will be executed.  There is a dreaminess diffused