And after a while angels came and ministered to him.  Thankfulness came softly, gently, to take his shaking hand in hers.  The awful past was over.  A false step, a momentary giddiness on the part of his enemy, and the hideous strangling meshes of the past had fallen from him at a touch, as if they had never wrapped him round.  Lord Newhaven was gone to return no more.  The past went with him.  Dead men tell no tales.  No one knew of the godless compact between them, and of how he, Hugh, had failed to keep to it, save they two alone.  He and one other.  And that other was dead—­was dead.

Hope came next, shyly, silently, still pale from the embrace of her sister Despair, trimming anew her little lamp, which the laboring breath of Despair had wellnigh blown out.  She held the light before Hugh, shading it with her veil, for his eyes were dazed with long gazing into darkness.  She turned it faintly upon the future, and he looked where the light fell.  And the light grew.

He had a future once more.  He had been given that second chance for which he had so yearned.  His life was his own once more:  not the shamed life in death—­worse than death of the last two days—­but his own to take up again, to keep, to enjoy, best of all, to use worthily.  No horrible constraint was upon him to lay it down, or to live in torment because he still held it.  He was free, free to marry Rachel whom he loved, and who loved him.  He saw his life with her.  Hope smiled, and turned up her light.  It was too bright.  Hugh hid his face in his hands.

And, last of all, dwarfing Hope, came a divine constraining presence who ever stretches out strong hands to them that fall, who alone sets the stumbling feet upon the upward path.  Repentance came to Hugh at last.  In all this long time she had not come while he was suffering, while smouldering Remorse had darkened his soul with smoke.  But in this quiet hour she came and stood beside him.

Hugh had in the past leaned heavily on extenuating circumstances.  He had made many excuses for himself.  But now he made none.  Perhaps, for the first time in his life, under the pressure of that merciful, that benign hand, he was sincere with himself.  He saw his conduct—­that easily condoned conduct—­as it was.  Love and Repentance, are not these the great teachers?  Some of us so frame our lives that we never come face to face with either, or with ourselves.  Hugh came to himself at last.  He saw how, whether detected or not, his sin had sapped his manhood, spread like a leaven of evil through his whole life, laid its hideous touch of desecration and disillusion even on his love for Rachel.  It had tarnished his mind; his belief in others; his belief in good.  These ideals, these beliefs had been his possession once, his birthright.  He had sold his birthright for red pottage.  Until now he had scorned the red pottage.  Now he saw that his sin lay deeper, even in his original scorn of his birthright, his disbelief in the Divine Spirit who dwells with man.