Then he sent her away, and turning in his narrow berth, thought again, as he had thought many times, of all the sin and evil doing he had heaped up against himself and others since the day he last saw his native land. Many and terribly bitter were the thoughts crowding his brain and filling him with remorse, as he lay there day after day, and knew that with each turn of the noisy screw he was nearing the home where there was not a friend to welcome him. “But once there,” he said to himself, “once back in the old place, I’ll begin life anew. I’ll make friends even of my enemies for the sake of my darling; oh, Queenie, my child, there is so much I would undo for you—for you—to whom the greatest wrong of all has been done, and you so unconscious of it. Would you kiss me as you do? Would you love me as you do, if you knew all the dark past as I know it? Oh, my child! my child!” and, covering his face with his hands, the sick man sobbed aloud. “If I live to get there,” was now the burden of his thoughts; but could he live he asked himself, as, day by day, he felt he was growing weaker, and counted the rapid heart-beats and saw the streaks of blood upon the napkin his faithful Pierre held to his lips after a paroxysm of coughing. The desire for life was stronger within him now than it had been in years; but the candle was burned out; there was only the snuff remaining, and when at last the scent of the land breeze was borne through his open window, and Reinette came rushing in to tell him they were entering the harbor, and she had _seen_ America, he knew the hand of death was on him, and that the only shore he should ever reach would be the boundless shore of eternity, which was looming up so black before him. But he would let Reinette be happy as long as possible, and so he sent her from him, and then with a low moan, he cried: “Pity me, oh, God! I have so much need to be forgiven.” In his gayest, most reckless moods, with his skeptical companions round him jeering at all that was sacred and holy, he had said there was no God, that the Bible was only an old woman’s fable, but he had never quite believed it, and now, with death measuring his life by heart-beats, he knew there was a God and a hereafter by the stings of his own conscience, and the first prayer uttered in years fell from his white lips. Oh, how many and how great were the sins which came back to him as he thought of his wasted life, remembering his mother dead so long ago; his father, too, whose last words to him had been a curse; and the beautiful Margaret, whom for a short period he had loved with a love so impetuous that in a few short months it had burned itself out and left only poisonous ashes where the fierce passion had been. How gentle, and patient, and forgiving she was, and how basely he had requited her faithfulness and love. “Oh, Margaret,” he whispered, “I am so sorry, and if I could undo the past I would.”