His sweet young wife, so loving and gentle—how shamefully he had neglected her, seeking his own pleasure selfishly—there she sat in the familiar chair by the fireside with dear little Daisy dancing on her knee. What a quiet, restful interior it was! He wondered: would they miss him much if he were dead? . . . Above all, would little Daisy understand what it meant when some one whispered to her "favee is dead"?
The wavering shadows seemed to thicken around the boat. And the figure at the oars—how lean and white it was: and yet it seemed a good kind of fellow, too, he thought. Preston watched it musingly as the stream bore them onward: the rushing of the water almost lulling him to sleep.
Were they sweeping outward, then, to the unknown sea?
It was an unexpected journey. . . . And he had asked to be taken home!
Presently the air grew full of shapes: shadowy shapes with mournful faces; shapes that hinted secrets, with threatenings in their eyes.
If a man's sins, now, should take to themselves bodies, would it not be in some such guise as this they would front and affright him at dead of night?
Preston shivered, sitting there like a mere numb lump.
How much of his wrong-doing is forgiven to a man—and how much remembered against him in the reckoning?
How awful this gruesome isolation was becoming!
Was it thus a man went drifting up to God?