he had done wrong, and he was going to do wrong; but God, who had gone out of His way to mercifully convert him and keep him straight for a while, could certainly have gone on keeping him if He had chosen.  His mind was a logical one.  He had been taught to praise God for some extraordinary favour towards him; he had been taught that the grace which had changed his life for good was in no degree his own; and why then was he to bear all the disgrace of his return to evil?

In the next hours he walked the streets of the town, and talked to other men when need was, and did a little business on his own account in the agency in which he was engaged, and went home and took supper, watching the vagaries of his father’s senile mania with more than common pity for the old man.  His own wretchedness gave him an aching heart of sympathy for all the sorrow of others which came across his mind that day.

The whole day was a new revelation to him of what tenderness for others could be and ought to be.

He did not hope to attain to any working out of this higher sympathy and pity himself.  The wonderful confidence which his new faith had so long given him, that he was able in God’s strength to perform the higher rather than the lower law of his nature, had ebbed away.  God’s strength was no longer with him; he was going to the devil; he could do nothing for himself, little for others; but he sympathised as never before with all poor lost souls.  He was a little surprised, as the day wore to a close, that he had been able to control his craving, that he had not taken more rum.  Still, he knew that he would soon be helpless.  It was his doom, for he could awake in himself no further feeling of repentance or desire to return to God.

In the long day’s struggle, half conscious and half unconscious, his love for Ann—­and it was not a bad sort of love either—­had triumphed over what principle he had; it had survived the sudden shock that had wrecked his faith.  The hell which he was experiencing was intolerable now, because of the heaven which he had seen, and he could not forgive the God who had ordained it.  The unreal notion that an omnipotent God can permit what He does not ordain could have no weight with him, for he was grappling with reality.  As he brooded bitterly upon his own fate, his heart became enlarged with tenderness for all other poor helpless creatures like himself who were under the same misrule.

His resolution was taken—­he would use his sobriety to help Ann.  It would not profit himself, but still he would win from her the promise concerning her future life and Christa’s which she had offered him, and he would go that night and do all that a man could do to help the poor wretch to whom his heart went out with ever-increasing pity.  It would not be much, but he would do what he could, and after that he would tell the authorities what he had done and give up his office.  He had a very vague notion of the penalties he would incur; if they put him in prison, so much the better—­it might save him a little longer from drinking himself to death.