A worthy record that!
One was dying: yes, that he knew, and felt that upon his speed and
resolution did it depend whether in this world he might hope for the
blessing of forgiveness from her lips. The thought urged him on,
like an ever-fretting spur. He butted yet more swiftly into the
darkness and against the reeling snow-flakes, and the road lay in
steadily-lengthening stretches behind him. She was waiting for him--that
he felt--and was striving, with all her kind and loving might, to hold
herself in life until he came. God help him, then, to be there at the
appointed hour!
And Cornelia? Of her he ventured not much to think. She was, perchance,
the key whereby, for her and for himself, this dark riddle should
hereafter be resolved. As Adam might labor for redemption only with his
sin about his neck, so they, out of the fabric woven of their disgrace,
must seek to fashion garments in which worthily to appear at heaven's
gates.
As his mind rambled thus, he came to the outskirts of a long, wooded
tract, which--for the map, as he had seen it at the railway-station, was
clearly marked out in his memory, from the beginning to the end of his
route--he knew was upward of ten miles from his starting-point; and, as
near as he could judge (his watch, lying at the bottom of the
fountain-basin in the Parsonage-garden, had never been replaced), it
must be rather more than half-past nine o'clock.
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