It was too late now: why need he think of what might have been?
Yet he did think of it through the long winter's night,--each moment his thought of the life to come, or of her, growing more tender and more bitter.

Do you wonder at the remorse of this man?
Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God and death.

Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life you have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which God sees it,--as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in their true light then.

Yet, coming back to life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached down there with his old iron will: all the pain he bore in looking back to the false life before, or the ceaseless remembrance that it was too late now to atone for that false life, made him the stronger to abide by that resolve, to go on the path self-chosen, let the end be what it might.

Whatever the resolve was, it did not still the gnawing hunger in his heart that night, which every trifle made more fresh and strong.
There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled up with bits of cloth and leather out of which she was manufacturing Christmas gifts; a pair of great woollen socks, which one of the sisters had told him privately Lois meant for him, lying on top.