Alice's was the stronger will, and she weakly yielded to it, and became the reluctant tool in the hands of the seducer. In one awful moment it burst upon the proud old man that his name was branded with disgrace, his daughter fled, his love outraged, his honor stabbed a deadly blow; all that he had lived for lost; all that he had hoped for blighted. In that household there was such amazement and wrath and desolation as are horrible but to imagine. Love outraged most cruelly, friendship betrayed most vilely, all that was pure turned into sin, all that was true turned false. In one short hour, the pride of that ungodly home was humbled to the dust, its fair name stained with shame, its very life's blood oozing from that cruel wound. "Therefore revenge became it well?" Therefore the agony that nothing else could allay, should seek to dull itself in vengeance, should hunt to the very death the shameless traitor? Should hurl blighting curses on the head of her who had brought this ruin on her home? But God stayed the impotent wrath of man. He took the vengeance that alone is His, in His own hands; the curses that the outraged father called down on his erring child, clustered, a black and ghastly troop, around his own dying bed, and shut off the last ray of mercy. Before a hand could be raised to deal vengeance, death struck down the father, and but few days and nights of anguish and solicitude had passed before his heir lay dead beside him, and the life of the boy who alone of all survived, lay trembling in the balance. For a long while it seemed uncertain whether God had not forgotten the race that had so long forgotten Him; whether He had not turned away His face, and they should all die and turn again to their dust; whether the memory of them should not be rooted off of the earth, and their name perish from among the children of men. For a long while, the boy lay between life and death, but when at last life conquered, and he came back to the changed and desolated world, it was with but little gratitude for the boon that had been granted him, with almost a loathing of the life that had been spared to him. It is not necessary to the purposes of my story nor will it further its elucidation, to repeat the history of the years that followed. It is sufficient that they were years of misanthropy and misery, almost of infidelity. Travel, change, society, neither attracted nor soothed him; the life he led it suited no one to join him in, and in the midst of the world he lived unmolested by it and regardless of it. At last--what need to tell when or how--there came an awakening; he saw the truth he had been so long shutting his eyes from, he saw God's mercy and his own sin, and rousing from his apathy he bent himself to the work that lay before him. We know what that work was, and how well he fulfilled it; from the misanthropic recluse, he became the Christian. I knew all this, and much more, that he did not tell me.