“But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now. For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning. He would arrive on the scene at exactly the right moment--four minutes past ten, the long-ago appointed instant of time--and the water would be shoal, the achievement easy and certain. But he will arrive some seconds too late, now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best, but both will drown.” “Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!” I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes, “save them! Don’t let it happen. I can’t bear to lose Nikolaus, he is my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa’s poor mother!” I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me sit down again, and told me I must hear him out. “I have changed Nikolaus’s life, and this has changed Lisa’s. If I had not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from his drenching; one of your race’s fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?” “Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is.” “It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers, but not one of them was worth living; they were charged full with miseries and disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve days from now--a deed begun and ended in six minutes--and get for all reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told you of. It is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour’s happiness and self-satisfaction is paid for--or punished--by years of suffering.” I wondered what poor little Lisa’s early death would save her from. He answered the thought: “From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from nineteen years’ pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her mother?” “Yes--oh, indeed yes; and wiser.” “Father Peter’s case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted, through unassailable proofs of his innocence.” “Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?” “Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his life will be happy.” “I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect.” “His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I shall change his life that day, for his good. He will never know his good name has been restored.” In my mind--and modestly--I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no attention to my thought. Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and I wondered where he might be.