The retrospect which occupied his mind was scarcely more cheerful than the gray scene which spread before his eyes. How awful are the corpses of dead sins which memory casts up, as the sea its victims! The betrayal of a woman is a ghastly thing when one looks back upon it stripped of the garlands and enchantments of passion and temptation; and to Farnsworth, with the image fresh in his rememberance of that faded, earth-stained woman digging a grave upon the bleak hillside, the fault of his youth seemed an incredible dream which only stubborn and stinging memory converted into a possibility. A retrospect is apt to be essentially a plea for self against conscience; but in his gloomy revery Farnsworth found scant excuse for the wreck he had made of the life of Delia Grimwet. He had gone away, married, and lived honored and prosperous. He would have forgotten, had not some nobility of his nature prevented. With the stubbornness of his race, he had fought long and determinedly against his conscience, but he had been forced to yield at last. The death of his wife, to whom he had been tenderly attached, had at once left him free to make such reparation as might still be possible, and had softened him as only sharp sorrow can. He had come to Kempton with the determination of finding Delia, and of doing whatever could be done, at whatever cost to himself. He had been unprepared, however, for the woman he found. He had left a fresh, beautiful young girl; ten years had transformed her into a repulsive old woman. He had no means of adequately measuring the force of the storms of scorn and poverty and sorrow which had beaten upon Delia Grimwet in the years that had made of him the cultured, delicately nurtured man he was. What man ever appreciated the woe of the woman he betrays? Indeed, what measure has a man of the sorrow of any woman? Farnsworth had painfully to adjust himself to a condition of affairs for which he should have been prepared, yet which took him absolutely by surprise. He lingered upon the bleak wharf, unconsciously the object of much mildly speculative curiosity, until the twilight began to fall. Then with a shiver, no less of mind than of body, he shook off his painful abstraction, and turned his steps toward the path, once well known, which led to the house of Delia Grimwet. It seemed to him, as he paused a brief instant with his hand upon the old knocker, as if nothing here had changed in ten years. The sunlight would have shown him traces of decay, but in the gathering dusk the house seemed a pallid phantom from the past, unchanged but lifeless. But his knock at once destroyed all illusions, since it summoned the woman who belonged not at all to that past which he remembered, but to the pitiful and too tangible present. She held her guttering candle up without a word, and, having identified him, made him, without speaking, a signal to enter.