“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone--the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph. “With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.” Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s real material, the human soul. _The Deliverance_ is a story of revenge with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer, while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher; wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair, directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken and sipping her port, blind--blind--successfully deceived, successfully kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’” A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be anything but proud. BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW