Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God.

I came but now from such a deathbed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.' 'And do you, then, suppose me such a creature ?' asked Markheim.

'Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven?
My heart rises at the thought.

Is this, then, your experience of mankind?
or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness?
and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good ?' 'Murder is to me no special category,' replied the other.

'All sins are murder, even as all life is war.