Easy words.  What do they mean for me?  To creep back now to bed by his side, and to begin living again to-morrow the life which I have lived to-day?  No, no; I cannot do it.  Heaven cannot ask it of me.  And there is no other way.  That or this; this or that.  Which shall it be?  Ah!  I have striven, God knows.  I have endured so long that I hoped even to do so to the end.  But to-day!  Oh! the torment and the outrage:  body and soul still bear the stain of it.  I thought that my heart and my pride were dead together, but he has stung them again into aching, shameful life.  Yesterday I might have spared him, to save my own cold soul from sin; but now it is cold no longer.  It burns, it burns and the fire must be slaked.

Ay, I will kill him, and have done with it.  Why should I pause any longer?  The knife drags my hand back for the stroke.  Only the dream surrounds me; the pure man’s face is there, white, beseeching, and God’s voice rings in my heart—­

“To him that overcometh.”

But I cannot overcome.  Evil has governed my life, and evil is stronger than I am.  What shall I do? what shall I do?  God, if Thou art stronger than evil, fight for me.

“The victory of the Cross is ours.”

Yes, I know it.  It is true, it is true.  But the knife?  I cannot loose the knife if I would.  How to wrench it from my own hold?  Thou God of Victory be with me!  Christ help me!

I seize the blade with my left hand; the two-edged steel slides through my grasp; a sharp pain in fingers and palm; and then—­ nothing. . . .

. . . . . .

VI

When I again became conscious, I found myself half kneeling, half lying across the bed, my arms stretched out in front of me, my face buried in the clothes.  Body and mind were alike numbed.  A smarting pain in my left hand, a dreadful terror in my heart, were at first the only sensations of which I was aware.  Slowly, very slowly, sense and memory returned to me, and with them a more vivid intensity of mental anguish, as detail by detail I recalled the weird horror of the night.  Had it really happened,—­was the thing still there,—­or was it all a ghastly nightmare?  It was some minutes before I dared either to move or look up, and then fearfully I raised my head.  Before me stretched the smooth white coverlet, faintly bright with yellow sunshine.  Weak and giddy, I struggled to my feet, and, steadying myself against the foot of the bed, with clenched teeth and bursting heart, forced my gaze round to the other end.  The pillow lay there, bare and unmarked save for what might well have been the pressure of my own head.  My breath came more freely, and I turned to the window.  The sun had just risen, the golden tree-tops were touched with light, faint threads of mist hung here and there across the sky, and the twittering of birds sounded clearly through the crisp autumn air.