All the temptations that had beset him rose clearly before him; the scenes themselves stood up in their solid materialism—­he could have touched the places; the people, the thoughts, the arguments that Satan had urged in behalf of sin, were reproduced with the vividness of a present time.  And he knew that the thoughts were illusions, the arguments false and hollow; for in that hour came the perfect vision of the perfect truth:  he saw the ‘way to escape’ which had come along with the temptation; now, the strong resolve of an ardent boyhood, with all a life before it to show the world ’what a Christian might be’; and then the swift, terrible now, when his naked, guilty soul shrank into the shadow of God’s mercy-seat, out of the blaze of His anger against all those who act a lie.

His mind was wandering, and he plucked it back.  Was this death in very deed?  He tried to grasp at the present, the earthly present, fading quick away.  He lay there on the bed—­on Sally Dobson’s bed in the house-place, not on his accustomed pallet in the lean-to.  He knew that much.  And the door was open into the still, dusk night; and through the open casement he could hear the lapping of the waves on the shelving shore, could see the soft gray dawn over the sea—­he knew it was over the sea—­he saw what lay unseen behind the poor walls of the cottage.  And it was Sylvia who held his hand tight in her warm, living grasp; it was his wife whose arm was thrown around him, whose sobbing sighs shook his numbed frame from time to time.

‘God bless and comfort my darling,’ he said to himself.  ’She knows me now.  All will be right in heaven—­in the light of God’s mercy.’

And then he tried to remember all that he had ever read about, God, and all that the blessed Christ—­that bringeth glad tidings of great joy unto all people, had said of the Father, from whom He came.  Those sayings dropped like balm down upon his troubled heart and brain.  He remembered his mother, and how she had loved him; and he was going to a love wiser, tenderer, deeper than hers.

As he thought this, he moved his hands as if to pray; but Sylvia clenched her hold, and he lay still, praying all the same for her, for his child, and for himself.  Then he saw the sky redden with the first flush of dawn; he heard Kester’s long-drawn sigh of weariness outside the open door.

He had seen widow Dobson pass through long before to keep the remainder of her watch on the bed in the lean-to, which had been his for many and many a sleepless and tearful night.  Those nights were over—­he should never see that poor chamber again, though it was scarce two feet distant.  He began to lose all sense of the comparative duration of time:  it seemed as long since kind Sally Dobson had bent over him with soft, lingering look, before going into the humble sleeping-room—­as long as it was since his boyhood, when he stood by his mother dreaming of the life that should be his, with the scent of the cowslips tempting him to be off to the woodlands where they grew.  Then there came a rush and an eddying through his brain—­his soul trying her wings for the long flight.  Again he was in the present:  he heard the waves lapping against the shelving shore once again.