He went softly down the steps and along the street to the station, where he could get a train back to the City in a few moments.  To his own amazement, he was quite happy, he was even more than happy.  A species of exaltation possessed him.  Even the thought of himself, Arthur Carroll, posing nightly as a buffoon before the City crowds, did not daunt him.  He realized a kind of joyful acquiescence with even that.  He felt a happy patience when he considered the time that might elapse before he could see his family again.  He passed the butcher’s shop, and reflected with delight that he should be able to meet the note which was due next day.  He remembered happily that he had been able to send Charlotte a little sum of money for her trousseau, and that perhaps a part of it had bought the pretty, rose-colored dress which she was wearing that night.  Still, all this did not altogether account for the wonderful happiness which seemed to fill him as with light.  He hurried along the street frozen in ridges like a sea, and he remembered what Anna had written about the man who had wronged him, and all at once he understood what filled him with this exaltation of joy, and he understood that underneath all the petty dishonors of his life had been a worse dishonor which took hold of his very soul and precipitated all the rest, and that he was now rid of it.  He had no sense of triumph over his enemy, no joy that the Lord had at last wreaked vengeance upon the man who had injured him; but he was filled with an exceeding pity, and a sense of forgiveness which he had never in his life felt before.  He had never forgiven before; now he forgave.  He remembered, going along the streets, the words of The Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive my debts as I forgive my debtors,” and his very heart leaped with the knowledge that forgiveness was due him because of his forgiveness of another, and that the debt of honor to God and his own soul was paid.

THE END