But Florimel had not inherited
immediately from her mother, so far as disposition was concerned; in
these latter days she had grown very dear to him, and his love had
once more turned his face a little towards the path of righteousness.
Ah! when would he move one step to set his feet in it?
And now, after his whirlwind harvest of evil knowledge, bitter
disappointment, and fading passion, in the gathering mists of gray
hopelessness, and the far worse mephitic air of indifference, he
had come all of a sudden upon the ghastly discovery that, while
overwhelmed with remorse for the vanished past, the present and
the future had been calling him, but had now also--that present
and that future--glided from him, and folded their wings of gloom
in the land of shadows. All the fierce time he might have been
blessedly growing better, instead of heaping sin upon sin until
the weight was too heavy for repentance; for, while he had been
bemoaning a dead wife, that wife had been loving a renegade husband!
And the blame of it all he did not fail to cast upon that Providence
in which until now he had professed not to believe: such faith as
he was yet capable of, awoke in the form of resentment! He judged
himself hardly done by; and the few admonitory sermons he had
happened to hear, especially that in the cave about the dogs going
round the walls of the New Jerusalem, returned upon him, not as
warnings, but as old threats now rapidly approaching fulfilment.
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