And Old Man Murtrie kept on living and praying and being pious and wanting to be bad and not daring to and taking his medicine and being generally as ineffectual in the world either for good or evil as a butterfly in a hurricane. But things took a turn. There was a faded-looking blonde woman with stringy hair by the name of Mable who assisted Old Man Murtrie in the store, keeping his books and waiting on customers, and so forth. She was unmarried, and one day she announced to him that she was going to have a child. Old Man Murtrie had often looked at her with a recollection, a dim and faint remembrance, of the lusts of his youth and of his middle age. In his youth and middle age he had lusted after many women, but he had never let any of them know it, because he was afraid, and he had called his fears virtue, and had really believed that he was virtuous. “Whom do you suspect?” asked Old Man Murtrie, leering at Mable like a wraith blown down the ages from the dead adulteries of ruined Babylon. “Who?” cried Mable, an unlessoned person, but with a cruel, instinctive humor. “Who but you!” She had expected Old Man Murtrie to be outraged at her ridiculous joke, and, because she was unhappy herself, had anticipated enjoying his astounded protests. But it was she who was astounded. Old Man Murtrie's face was blank and his eyes were big for a moment, and then he chuckled; a queer little cackling chuckle. And when she went out he opened the door for her and cocked his head and cackled again. It gave Mable an idea. She reflected that he took so much opium that he might possibly be led to believe the incredible, and she might get some money out of him. So the next evening she brought her mother and her brother to the store and accused him. Old Man Murtrie chuckled and... _and admitted it!_ Whether he believed that it could be true or not, Mable and her people were unable to determine. But they made the tactical error of giving him his choice between marriage and money, and he chose matrimony. And then Old Man Murtrie was suddenly seized with a mania for confession. God and Death and the Devil used to listen to him nights, and they wondered over him, and began to change their minds about him, a little. He confessed to the officials of his church. He confessed to all the people whom he knew. He insisted on making a confession, a public confession, in the church itself and asking for the prayers of the preacher and congregation for his sin, and telling them that he was going to atone by matrimony, and asking for a blessing on the wedding. And one night, full of opium, while he-was babbling about it in his sleep, God and Death and the Devil sat on the prescription counter again and looked at him and listened to his ravings and speculated. “I'm going to have him,” said the Devil. “Any one who displays such conspicuous bad taste that he goes around confessing that he has ruined a woman ought to go to Hell.”