The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of rascality would have been a shock.  The sudden scattering of my plans for Judith’s happiness I should have viewed with consternation.  But it would have been normal.  For him, however, to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat, horribly fantastic.

“I believe, Sir Marcus,” said he, deliberately parting the tails of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, " that you are a very great friend of my wife.”

I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.

“You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history.”

“I have heard her speak of it,” said I.

“You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day.  I should like to assure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty God.”

I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my sense of taste.  I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.

“You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the circle of her life,” said I.

“The best of all reasons,” he replied, caressing a brown whisker, “namely, that I am a Christian.”

I liked him less and less.

“Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these years?”

“I deserve the scoff,” said he:  “Those were days of sin.  I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me.  But I have since found the grace of God.  I found it at three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and—­”

“Never mind the year,” I interrupted.

My gorge rose.  The man was a sanctimonious Chadband.  He had come with nefarious designs on Judith’s slender capital.  I saw knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.

“I should be glad,” I continued quickly, “if you would come to the point of the conversation you desire to have with me.  I presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring.  She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor.  You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so—­and I can’t see what the grace of God has to do with it.”

He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward gesture of an inspired English prophet.

“But it has everything to do with it!  It is the beginning and end, core and kernel, root and branch of the matter.  It is the grace of God that checked me in the full career of my wickedness.  It is the grace of God that has lighted my path ever since to holier things.  It is the grace of God that has changed me from what I was to what I am.  It is the grace of God that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged.  The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ, which came upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it did upon Saul of Tarsus.  The grace of God has everything to do with it.”