of his mind was too great.  He sat stiffly, and gazed vacantly before him, half seeing and half transforming into other visions whatever lay before the hansom, as it wound its way through the streets.  Now for a moment a four-wheeled cab, loaded with schoolboy luggage, occupied the field of view, and idle memories of his own boyhood flitted over it.  Then, crawling behind a dray, some strange associations built up the barrels into an old weatherstained wooden house in Holland, and for a while an intense realization of past scenes which love had made happy put present anxieties to sleep.  But they woke again with a horrible pang, as a grim, hideous funeral car drove slowly past, nodding like a nightmare.

As the traffic became less dense, and the cab went faster, the man’s thoughts went faster too.  He strove to do what he had not often tried, to review his life.  He had unconsciously gained the will to do it, because a reparation which conscience might hitherto have pressed on him was now impossible, and because the plague that had desolated Abel Lake’s home had swept the skeleton out of his own cupboard, and he could repent of the past and do his duty in the future.  His conscience was stronger than his courage.  He had long wished to repent, though he had not found strength to repair.

On one point he did not delude himself as he looked back over his life.  He had no sentimental regrets for the careless happiness of youth.  Is any period of human life so tormented with cares as a self-indulgent youth?  He had been a slave to expensive habits, to social traditions, to past follies, ever since he could remember.  He had been in debt, in pocket or in conscience, from his schoolboy days to this hour.  His tradesmen were paid long since, and, if death had cancelled what else he owed, how easy virtue would henceforth be!

It had not been easy at the date of his first marriage.  He was deeply in debt, and out of favor with his father.  It was on both accounts that he went abroad for some months.  In Holland he married.  His wife was Jan’s mother, and Jan was their only child.

Her people were of middle rank, leading quiet though cultivated lives.  Her mother was dead, and she was her old father’s only child.  It would be doing injustice to the kind of love with which she inspired her husband to dwell much upon her beauty, though it was of that high type which takes possession of the memory for ever.  She was very intensely, brilliantly fair, so that in a crowd her face shone out like a star.  Time never dimmed one golden thread in her hair; and Death, who had done so much for Mr. Ford’s client, could not wash that face from his brain.  It blotted the traffic out of the streets, and in their place Dutch pastures, whose rich green levels were unbroken by hedge or wall, stretched flatly to the horizon.  It bent over a drawing on his knee as he and she sat sketching together in an old-world orchard, where the trees bore