But, bein' started, preacher, he could not help it, an' he'd been round to Dobbs's again, 'fore he seen the fire." "Yes," John said.
Still smoothing the straight whiteness of the sheet, she said, with a tremor in her voice:-- "If he didn't want to, preacher--if he didn't mean to--perhaps it wasn't a sin?
and him dying in it!" Her voice broke, and she knelt down and hid her face in the dead man's breast.

She did not think of him now as the man that beat her when he was drunk, and starved the children; he was the young lover again.

The dull, brutal man and the fretful, faded woman had been boy and girl once, and had had their little romance, like happier husbands and wives.
John did not answer her, but a mist of tears gathered in his eyes.
Mrs.Davis raised her head and looked at him.

"Tell me, you don't think it will be counted a sin to him, do you?
You don't think he died in sin ?" she asked almost fiercely.
"I wish I could say I did not," he answered.
She threw her hands up over her head with a shrill cry.
"You don't think he's lost?
Say you don't, preacher,--say you don't!" John took her hands in his.

"Try and think," he said gently, "how brave Tom was, how nobly he faced death to save Charley.