He knew that, in the eyes of his wife, and in the eyes of the little world he had lived and laboured in, that he had lowered himself, had proved himself less than ordinarily human.
Some of his own recent platform and pulpit utterances, returned to his mind, and they stung him by their reproach. The very last sermon he had preached, before his breakdown of health, had had for its text, “To him that overcometh, will I give——.”
In the course of his address he had alluded to the shame of some of life’s failures, and had quoted William S. Walsh’s “Ichabod.”
Now, as he sat brooding over his own fall, the lines returned to him. They mocked him, gibed at him, becoming, to his brooding imagination, sentient things with laughing, mocking, sneering voices, that somehow contrived to fling back into his ears, the very tones of his own voice, as he had declaimed the verses from his platform, weeks ago:
“Alas, for the lofty dreaming,
The longed-for high emprise,
For the man whose outer seeming
His inner self belies!
“I looked on the life before me
With purpose high and true,