The vigorous motion, however, sent the blood singing through his body from head to foot.  He felt exhilarated and braced.  The driving snow melted pleasantly on his warm face, and ran down into his thickly-curling beard, crusted over with frozen breath and sleet.  The cold air came long and refreshingly into his wide-open nostrils.  He took off his fur cap and threw open the breast of his pea-jacket.  His exuberant physical sensations wrought a corresponding effect upon his previous mental gloom:  he found himself looking to the future with dawnings of a new hope and cheerfulness.  At no time in his life had he felt himself existing through so wide and full a range.  He was a man now in full breadth and height, and, as he looked back upon his previous life, he could trace, as from a lofty vantage-ground, the plan and bearing of his former thoughts and deeds.

He remarked the wide discrepancies between what he had proposed and what he had accomplished.  How insignificant circumstances had effected momentous results!  He saw how, whenever failure and dishonor had filtered in, it was where weakness, self-indulgence, or untruthfulness, had left an opening.  He saw how one wrong had been a sure and easy path to another, until in the end he had groveled face downward in the mire.

His mind turned on the two women between whom his path had lain:  how highly he had aimed, and how low he had fallen!  How enviable would have been his fate had he consistently kept to either! for each had been peerless in her way.  How despicable was his position having greedily grasped at both!  And now the one was dying, and the other degraded like himself.  A worthy record that!

One was dying:  yes, that he knew, and felt that upon his speed and resolution did it depend whether in this world he might hope for the blessing of forgiveness from her lips.  The thought urged him on, like an ever-fretting spur.  He butted yet more swiftly into the darkness and against the reeling snow-flakes, and the road lay in steadily-lengthening stretches behind him.  She was waiting for him—­that he felt—­and was striving, with all her kind and loving might, to hold herself in life until he came.  God help him, then, to be there at the appointed hour!

And Cornelia?  Of her he ventured not much to think.  She was, perchance, the key whereby, for her and for himself, this dark riddle should hereafter be resolved.  As Adam might labor for redemption only with his sin about his neck, so they, out of the fabric woven of their disgrace, must seek to fashion garments in which worthily to appear at heaven’s gates.