It was because of this noble-heartedness of his wife, because she had drawn him back, and soothed and attracted, instead of exasperating him, and driving him headlong down the precipice of perdition on which he was already staggering, that he felt the keenest shame and remorse at his treatment of her. There was a time, he felt, when a few words of just reproach from her would have stung him to a ruinous desperation, and these words had never been spoken. Oh! in those dreary winter days and nights at Tunckhannock in the far-off American forests, how these thoughts had come in upon him, and scorched and wrung him, and made him cry out aloud, “Fool! fool!” And yet with the spring came the loving letter of that ever-faithful wife, reminding him of the Redeemer’s heavenly words, “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost!” Nothing, not even a fragment of anything belonging to that immortal God-derived thing—the soul—was to be lost, if any effort, any faith could save it; and Thorsby had then made a vow, that he would devote his life, his strength, his everything to make a recompense to God and to that faithful woman. And he had kept it. It was long before he could regain the favourable opinion of his townsmen; and especially of those more noble-minded ones whose esteem he especially coveted. Dark, cold looks, estranged faces, that did not deign even a recognition: a leaving out and passing over him, in all public and benevolent works and subscriptions in the town, as if his very money were contamination. Yet his wife had prepared the way for his reception at Woodburn, and had induced her father and family to meet him in a friendly manner. In his own house in Castleborough, there was always a bright look, and a pleasant word, and a cheery hearth, and all the news of the place that could cast a lively spell over the dinner or the tea-table was detailed in Letty’s happiest manner. It was like stepping from winter to summer, out of the streets where some bitter cut had been experienced, or where some side-long glance of the passer by, had said plainly, “Oh, there goes that abandoned Thorsby, and he dares to show his face here again!” Nothing but this firm, fast, heart-strengthening anchorage of home could have made Thorsby stand out this time of justly incurred contempt and reproach. He knew that many said that Thorsby had no ballast in him, and that some day he would break down again as intolerably as ever. It was this consciousness, combined with his sense of the love that had saved him, and that cared for no scorn, no malicious misconstruction of her actions; no taunts that she was trying to make a bulrush into a stable tree, so that she could save him still, that made him resolve to stand firm by the help of God, and thus give her the reward of a conquest so dearly and nobly striven after.