“Is this the message?” he put to himself as he turned away.  “Is this the message, or is it only the ugly hallucination of my nerves?” With an effort he sought to shake the image from him, but in spite of his closed mind it still seemed to him that he saw Connie’s future looking back at him from the woman’s terrible eyes.  “And yet what have I to do with that woman or she with Connie?” he demanded.  “I have so far as I am aware never injured either in my life, nor by any act of mine have I helped to make my wife what she is to-day—­one with that creature in the street and with her kind.  The law acquits me.  Religion acquits me.  My own conscience acquits me more than all.”  But the argument was vain and empty so long as he saw Connie’s future revealed to him through the eyes of the harlot he had left at the crossing.  The helplessness of ignorance, of the will that desired to will the good, came over him at the moment and he could have cried aloud in his terror because his soul had reached the boundaries between its angel and its devil.  In his decision he appeared to himself to stand absolutely solitary and detached—­put away from all help from humanity or from human creeds.  The law courts told him nothing, nor did religion—­then, at the instant of his sharpest despair of knowledge, there came back to him, as in a vision of light, the scene two thousand years ago in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper.  The people passing about him in the street became suddenly but shadows, even the noise of the cars no longer broke in confusion upon his ears; and in the midst of the silence in which he stood, he heard the Voice as Simon had heard it then:  “I have somewhat to say unto thee.”

A moment afterward the vision was gone, and he looked round him dazed by the flashing of the lights.  “What does it matter about my life which is almost over?” he asked.  “I will help Connie, so far as I have strength, to bear her sin against me—­and as for the rest it is nothing to me any more.”  Then, as the resolution took shape in his mind, he was conscious of a feeling of restfulness, of a relief so profound that it pervaded him to the smallest fibre of his being.  The whole situation had changed at the instant; his offended honour was no longer offended, nor was his righteous anger still righteous.  Though the naked truth must face him in all its brutishness, he knew, from the feeling within him, that by an act of thought, which was not an act, he had drawn the sting of the poisoned arrow from his wound.  Not only had the bitterness passed from his shame, but there had come, with the relinquishment of the idea of personal wrong, a swift rush of exaltation, like a strong wind, through his soul.  Almost unconsciously he had yielded his will into the hands of God, and immediately, as in the prophecy “all these things had been added” unto the rest.

Turning at once he walked rapidly in the direction of his house, while a clock in a tower across the way pointed to the stroke of nine o’clock.  The bodily exertion had begun to wear upon him during the last few minutes.  His feet ached and there was a bruised feeling in all his muscles.  When he came at last to his own door the sensation of fatigue had blotted out the acuteness of his perceptions.