The coach-driver was soon under the table; and the troopers, though most of them, when the last drop provided was emptied from the flask, could make their way by diagonals to the dormitory assigned to them, were in a state which promised no early rising on the following day; and Edward and his friendly soldier parted about eleven o'clock, the latter merely saying, "We shall have a heavy storm to-night. The clouds are rolling up like distant mountains. But all the better for your purpose. Remember three!" The consequences! Good God! How frightful a thing it is to consider what--under an overruling hand and will omnipotent--may be the consequences of the smallest deed we do. The consequences immediate, proximate, future! How many lives, what an amount of misery, how much damnation, may depend upon a light word, an idle jest, a sportive trick! Should such a consideration forbid us to act and do, to resolve and to perform? Far from it. Man is an active being, and his life is deeds. Each moment must have its thought or its action, or the whole is sleep; but the consideration of that strange thing, CONSEQUENCE,--that overruling of our deeds to ends that we see not,--should teach us so to frame thought, word, and act, that, be the consequences what they may, we may be able at the great end of all to say, boldly, "I did it in an honest heart." God himself is responsible for the result if man acts with purity of intent. Not one man in that small room who had that night "sinned as it were with a cart-rope" ever saw the dawning of the morning; and it was a heavy thought to Edward Langdale for many a year after, "What share had I in this?" For himself, he took the little lamp which had been left for him, and sought the cell where his pallet lay. But he had no thought of sleep. As he went along the corridor, with the rays just gleaming upon the fretted stone-work, something like a flash reddened the dim panes of the painted windows, and some seconds afterward a distant roar was heard, as if of a heavy sea rolling along an extended shore. "It will thunder," he said to himself; but he thought of it no more; and, opening the door of the cell, on the little table beneath the window appeared the missal and the skull and cross-bones--the _memento mori_ of the cloister. CHAPTER XIII.