“Have you ever noticed how the scent of the champagne and the candles seems to cling to these things?” he said lightly, sniffing carelessly at it.  “I wonder what’s become of her?”

“I think I wouldn’t think about her at all to-night,” I answered.

He loosened his hand, letting the paper fall into the fire.

“My God!” he cried vehemently, “when I think of all the wrong I have done—­the irreparable, ever-widening ruin I have perhaps brought into the world—­O God! spare me a long life that I may make amends.  Every hour, every minute of it shall be devoted to your service.”

As he stood there, with his eager boyish eyes upraised, a light seemed to fall upon his face and illumine it.  I had pushed the photograph back to him, and it lay upon the table before him.  He knelt and pressed his lips to it.

“With your help, my darling, and His,” he murmured.

The next morning he was married.  She was a well-meaning girl, though her piety, as is the case with most people, was of the negative order; and her antipathy to things evil much stronger than her sympathy with things good.  For a longer time than I had expected she kept him straight—­perhaps a little too straight.  But at last there came the inevitable relapse.

I called upon him, in answer to an excited message, and found him in the depths of despair.  It was the old story, human weakness, combined with lamentable lack of the most ordinary precautions against being found out.  He gave me details, interspersed with exuberant denunciations of himself, and I undertook the delicate task of peace-maker.

It was a weary work, but eventually she consented to forgive him.  His joy, when I told him, was boundless.

“How good women are,” he said, while the tears came into his eyes.  “But she shall not repent it.  Please God, from this day forth, I’ll—­”

He stopped, and for the first time in his life the doubt of himself crossed his mind.  As I sat watching him, the joy died out of his face, and the first hint of age passed over it.

“I seem to have been ‘tidying up and starting afresh’ all my life,” he said wearily; “I’m beginning to see where the untidiness lies, and the only way to get rid of it.”

I did not understand the meaning of his words at the time, but learnt it later on.

He strove, according to his strength, and fell.  But by a miracle his transgression was not discovered.  The facts came to light long afterwards, but at the time there were only two who knew.

It was his last failure.  Late one evening I received a hurriedly-scrawled note from his wife, begging me to come round.

“A terrible thing has happened,” it ran; “Charley went up to his study after dinner, saying he had some ‘tidying up,’ as he calls it, to do, and did not wish to be disturbed.  In clearing out his desk he must have handled carelessly the revolver that he always keeps there, not remembering, I suppose, that it was loaded.  We heard a report, and on rushing into the room found him lying dead on the floor.  The bullet had passed right through his heart.”