"I should be glad to give you the first lesson in the code of salvation," I said--"that the fate of souls is not left to human hands." "Oh, I've heard that formula somewhere before!" exclaimed the fisherman, impatiently, with a little sneer in his laugh. "Why don't you tell me that God will help me? Perhaps you will even remember me in your prayers, some time." At those last words an unbearable pang of self-conviction and remorse shot through my heart. I, who had not felt greatly the need of any supernatural aid, but rather that I was able to manage my own affairs with becoming discretion--of what saving power and grace could I speak to one who was weak enough to fall, and for whom there was no help in himself? In the dark school-room I involuntarily lifted my hands to my face. When I heard the fisherman's voice again, he had come a step or two nearer to me down the aisle. "Let me tell you what I was thinking about when you came in," he said, in an altered tone. "Rather, how I was allowing my imagination to run away with itself, for my own particular delectation. I was imagining, when you opened the door and stood revealed there in the light, how you might come to me, indeed, as the angel of some better life and hope, offering me a forgiveness as full as it was unmerited." "It is not I who have to forgive you," I repeated. "It is you, if any one," replied the fisherman, quickly. "I tell you, you feel that girl Becky Weir's fault ten times more deeply than she feels it for herself. You should never have come to this place. It was deucedly odd and entertaining, but it was a step in the wrong direction. You put yourself in the place of these people and translate all their possible moods and tenses according to your own. It's a mistake. That girl, Becky, would stare in perfect bewilderment if she could know of some of the thoughts and emotions you doubtless attribute to her. She might even laugh at you for your pains." "I do not believe you," I said, not angrily nor resentfully, as might have been earlier in our acquaintance, but with a painful, slow positiveness. "Perhaps I was wrong in assuming the place I did in Wallencamp, but it was not in the way you think. I don't know--I can't see the way myself, clearly--always, but I believe that what you have said is utterly false!"