Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and 5 at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the com- 10 mon-place, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: "You are looking for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

"I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and 'will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences." "You know me?" cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favorite of mine," he said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you."

"What are you?" cried Markheim : "the devil?

15

20

"What I may be," returned the other, "can not 25 affect the service I propose to render you."

"It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!"

"I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind 30 severity or rather firmness. "I know you to the soul."

5

"Know me!" cried Markheim.

"Who can do so?

My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control--if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than 10 most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself."

"To me?" inquired the visitant.

"I

"To you before all," returned the murderer. 15 supposed you were intelligent. I thought since you exist—you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the 20 wrists since I was born out of my mother-the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never 25 blurred by any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity-the unwilling sinner?

"All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, 30" but it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least

by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is 5 as if the gallows itself was striding toward you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?" For what price?" asked Markheim.

"I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," re- 10 turned the other.

Markheim could not refain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. "No," said he, " I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should 15 find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil."

"I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the visitant.

"Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim 20

cried.

"I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion, 25 or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my sur- 30 viving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try

5

me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you,

for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a deathbed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words: 10 and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope."

"And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?" asked Markheim. "Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, 15 at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of 20 good?"

"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding 25 on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last conse. quence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore 30 than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I

follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by

the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the

Evil, for which I live, con-
The bad man is

reaping angel of Death.
sists not in action but in character.

dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could
follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of 5
the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those
of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have
killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I
offered to forward your escape."

"I will lay my heart open to you," answered Mark- 10 heim. "This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There 15 are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But today, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches-both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; 20 I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears 25 over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”

"You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" remarked the visitor; "and there, if I 30 mistake not, you have already lost some thousands? "