WHILE the two burglars were near the scullery-window watching the light in the upper story a third man stood sentinel on the opposite side of the house; he was but a few yards from the public road, yet hundreds would have passed and no man seen him; for he had placed himself in a thick shadow flat against the garden-wall.  His office was to signal danger from his side should any come.  Now the light that kept his comrades inactive was not on his side of the house; he waited therefore expecting every moment their signal that the job was done.  On this the cue was to slip quietly off and all make by different paths for the low public-house described above and there divide the swag.

The man waited and waited and waited for this signal; it never came; we know why.  Then he became impatient—­miserable; he was out of his element—­wanted to be doing something.  At last all this was an intolerable bore.  Not feeling warm toward the job, he had given the active business to his comrades, which he now regretted for two reasons.  First, he was kept here stagnant and bored; and second, they must be a pair of bunglers; he’d have robbed a parish in less time.  He would light a cigar.  Tobacco blunts all ills, even ennui.  Putting his hand in his pocket for a cigar, it ran against a hard, square substance.  What is this?—­oh! the book mephisto had sold him.  No, he would not smoke, he would see what the book was all about; he knelt down and took off his hat, and put his dark-lantern inside it before he ventured to move the slide; then undid the paper, and putting it into the hat, threw the concentrated rays on the contents and peered in to examine them.  Now the various little pamphlets had been displaced by mephisto, and the first words that met the thief’s eye in large letters on the back of a tract were these, “THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH.”

Thomas Robinson looked at these words with a stupid gaze.  At first he did not realize all that lay in them.  He did not open the tract; he gazed benumbed at the words, and they glared at him like the eyes of green fire when we come in the dark on some tiger-cat crouching in his lair.

Oh that I were a painter and could make you see what cannot be described—­the features of this strange incident that sounds so small and was so great!  The black night, the hat, the renegade peering under it in the wall’s deep shadows to read something trashy, and the half-open lantern shooting its little strip of intense fire, and the grim words springing out in a moment from the dark face of night and dazzling the renegade’s eyes and chilling his heart: 

“THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH.”

To his stupor now succeeded surprise and awe.  “How comes this?” he whispered aloud, “was this a trick of ——­’s?  No! he doesn’t know—­ This is the devil’s own doing—­no! it is not—­more likely it is—­The third time!—­I’ll read it.  My hands shake so I can hardly hold it.  It is by him—­yes—­signed F. E. Heaven, have mercy on me!—­This is more than natural.”