“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.

“In the moon,” said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was a chuckle.  “I’ve got him on the cold side of it, too.  He doesn’t know where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good enough for him, a good place for his star studies.  I shall need him presently; then I shall bring him back and possess him again.  He has a long and cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that, for I have no feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a kindness.  I think I shall get him burned.”

He had such strange notions of kindness!  But angels are made so, and do not know any better.  Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides, human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks.  It seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy.