Such was the outline of his thoughts that long day, during which hope and fear balanced an even scale. But the evening shadows found fear predominating. His awakened conscience and his recent contact with true moral standards revealed him to himself in darker and still darker shadow. At times he was almost ready to despair, to bid his entertainers a courteous farewell on Monday, and go back to the city as he came, with the additional wretchedness of having seen the heaven he could not enter. But when he came down to supper, Annie smiled so sweetly and looked so gentle and kind, that he thought, "She does not seem one to push a wretch over a precipice. That warm little hand that charmed away my headache so gently cannot write Dante's inscription over my 'Inferno,' and bid me enter it as 'my own place'; and yet I dread her sense of justice." In his anxiety and perturbation of mind he was unusually grave and silent during the meal and evening. Annie exulted secretly over him. "He is thinking in earnest now. His old apathy and trifling manner are gone." He was indeed thinking in terrible earnest. Her effort had awakened no school-girl interest and penitence that she could soothe and reward by quoting a few sweet promises, but had aroused a spirit like that which came down from the hills of Gadara, and which no man could bind. Men and women in good society may be very polished and refined, and yet their souls in God's sight and their own be shameful, "naked," wearing no robe of righteousness, bound by no laws of purity and right, and "always, night and day, crying and cutting" themselves in the unrest of remorse. Sad and yet true it was that the demon-possessed man, the terror of the Gadarenes, was but too true a type of the gentlemanly and elegant Walter Gregory, as he sat that night in a torment of dread and hope at the peaceful fireside of a Christian family. If his fears were realized--if Annie turned from him when he revealed his true self to her--there seemed to him every probability that evil evermore would be his master. While she was innocently hoping and praying that her words and influence might lead him to read his Bible, go to church, and eventually find his way into the "green pastures beside the still waters," it seemed that within a few hours she would either avert or complete that most awful of tragedies--the loss of a soul. He accompanied them to church the following morning, and his manner was grave even to solemnity. Little wonder. In a certain sense, in view of his resolution, the Judgment Day had come to him.