"But all the while you were under a mistake concerning me," groaned Michael, feeling himself compelled to confession. "What if I were to tell you that I am a man who has robbed the fatherless and the widow?"
"I'd not believe it," returned his brother. "No, not if you said it with your own lips, Michael."
"But it is true," he cried. And then brokenly, confusedly, he told the story of how he had kept the bank-notes he had found in the professor's book.
There was silence for some moments when he had ceased. Then the sick man leaned forward and laid his wasted hand on his brother's.
"Oh, I am so sorry for you, Michael," he whispered. "I know what you must have suffered with that burden on your heart. We are fellow-sinners."
"But I am the worse," said Michael. "'The first shall be last,' the Bible says. In the pride of my heart I thought myself far above you; but you would never have done a thing like that. No, you have been a better man than I all along. It's bad to be profligate; but I do believe it is worse to have a hard, unloving, pharisaical heart."
"'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,'" said the minister; and, as they all kept silence, he began to pray aloud, expressing as he believed the desire of each heart as he besought the Divine Father to forgive and blot out the sins of the past.
And as he prayed, its burden fell from the spirit of Michael Betts; his proud, hard heart was broken, and became as the heart of a little child in its sorrow and contrition. It was the birth-hour of a new life to him.
[CHAPTER XII]
MICHAEL'S HOUSE BECOMES A HOME