Labor of any kind would have made the interminable hours pass more quickly. The carving of a piece of wood might have kept him from torturing his own heart perpetually; but he did not turn to this slight solace. There were times when he sat for hours, for a whole age, as it seemed to him, in some lonely spot, hidden behind a great rock or half lost in a forest, thinking. And yet it was not thought, but a vague, mournful longing and remembrance, the past and the absent blended in dim, shadowy reverie, of which nothing was clear but the sharp anguish of having forfeited them. There was a Garden of Eden still upon earth, and he had been dwelling in it. But he had banished himself from it by his own folly and sin, and when he turned his eyes toward it he could see only the "flaming brand, and the gate with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms." But even Adam had his Eve with him, "to drop some natural tears, and wipe them soon." He was utterly alone. If his thoughts, so dazed and bewildered usually, became clear for a little while, it was always Felicita whose image stood out most distinctly before him. He had loved her passionately; surely never had any man loved a woman with the same intensity--so he said to himself. Even now the very crime he had committed seemed as nothing to him, because he had been guilty of it for her. His love for her covered its heinousness from his eyes. His conscience had become the blind and dumb slave of his passion. So blind and dumb had it been that it had scarcely stirred or murmured until his sin was found out, and it was scarcely aroused to life even yet. In a certain sense he had been religious, having been most sedulously trained in religion from his earliest consciousness. He had accepted the ordinary teachings of our nineteenth-century Christianity. His place in church, beside his mother or his wife, had seldom been empty, and several times in the year he had knelt with them at the Lord's table, and taken the Lord's Supper, feeling himself distinctly a more religious man than usual on such occasions. No man had ever heard him utter a profane word, nor had he transgressed any of the outward rules of a religious life. It is true he had never made a vehement and extraordinary profession of piety, such as some men do; but there was not a person in Riversborough who would not have spoken of him as a good churchman and a Christian. While he had been gradually appropriating Mr. Clifford's money and the hard-earned savings of poorer men confided to him, he had felt no qualm of conscience in giving liberally to many a religious and philanthropic object, contributing such sums as figure well in a subscription list; though it was generally his wife's name that figured there. He had never taken up a subscription list without glancing first for that beloved name, Mrs. Roland Sefton.