There was no struggle in his face; whatever was the resolve he had reached in the solitary hours when he had stood so close upon the borders of death, it was unshaken now; but the heart, crushed and stifled before, was taking its dire revenge. If ever it had hungered, through the cold, selfish days, for God's help, or a woman's love, it hungered now, with a craving like death. If ever he had thought how bare and vacant the years would be, going down to the grave with lips that never had known a true wife's kiss, he remembered it now, when it was too late, with bitterness such as wrings a man's heart but once in a lifetime. If ever he had denied to his own soul this Margret, called her alien or foreign, it called her now, when it was too late, to her rightful place; there was not a thought nor a hope in the darkest depths of his nature that did not cry out for her help that night,--for her, a part of himself,--now, when it was too late. He went over all the years gone, and pictured the years to come; he remembered the money that was to help his divine soul upward; he thought of it with a curse, getting up and pacing the floor of the narrow room, slowly and quietly. Looking out into the still starlight and the quaint garden, he tried to fancy this woman as he knew her, after the restless power of her soul should have been chilled and starved into a narrow, lifeless duty. He fancied her old, and stern, and sick of life, she that might have been what might they not have been, together? And he had driven her to this for money,--money!