Suddenly bringing himself to a stand before Eve, he said, "Eve, be sure your sin will find you out."
"No, Reuben--no;" and she put up her hand as if to avert the continuance of any homily: "'tis of no good talking like that. Sorrow has sealed up my heart against taking condemnation or comfort from anything of that sort."
"It isn't of you I'm thinking," he exclaimed. "Oh," he cried, giving vent to his pent-up feelings, "down into what a pitfall a minute's evil passion may fling a man! To think that I, while I was crying vengeance against others, was drawing down the wrath of God upon my own head, stamping myself with the brand of Cain, and doing the devil's work by sending men to death with all their sins still heavy on their souls!"
"Reuben, what is it you mean?" and seizing hold of him with both her hands, Eve gazed into his face.
"That the thought you had was true," he said, "and that 'twas me who dropped the paper in that told them where the Lottery would be found;" and a tremor ran through Reuben's frame: his pulses for a moment quickened, and then grew faint and seemed to die away; while Eve uttered neither word nor sound: her eyes drooped, her hold relaxed, and tottering she sank back into the seat behind her, and there sat motionless and still as one carved out of stone.
The abandonment of hope, the unutterable despair of face and form, so unlike anything which Reuben had ever seen in Eve, touched him as no reproaches could have done. That depth of misery which words can neither describe nor express pierced his inmost soul and added to the stings with which conscience was already smiting him. Not for the act of betrayal, for had there been no Eve to prompt him Reuben would have looked upon it as an act of justice that he should aid the law against men who set order and government at defiance, and though each man on board had met his death Reuben would have held his conscience free of any tittle of reproach; but, equitable and unyielding to himself as well as to others, he full well knew that when he wrote the words which sealed the Lottery's fate justice was clean gone out of his mind. He neither knew nor cared what might become of the men whose safety he betrayed: the whole rancor of his hate was turned against his rival; and the paper he flung into the rendezvous window was as much a blow aimed at Adam as if he had dealt him a thrust and had stabbed him in the dark.