The sun began to fall behind the trees before Homer rose. As he did so, he cast a look at the rock upon which he had been resting; there, caught in a crevice, lay an old-fashioned bullet. He picked it up and looked at it lying in his palm. One could scarcely imagine it speeding through the air upon a hurtful mission. It had wandered on to find a victim, until, its impetus spent, it had fallen ingloriously to lie upon this rock, mocked by the sunlight which it had been meant to darken forever for some living creature. Homer slipped it into his pocket and began to make his way shoreward, leaping lightly from stone to stone. As he sprang to land again, he said between his teeth, "I'd like to hear any she-cat in the crowd open her lips to my wife!" It will be seen his reverie had developed its subject.
Homer held his way home happily, his eyes alight, his face aglow with his old generous spirit. He was once more the Homer of the past. Realizing this, he recognized the debt he owed Myron Holder, and paid homage to that strong soul whose mute endurance of ignominy and betrayal had shamed his own sleeping soul into life. It is plain to us that Myron Holder's shame was Homer Wilson's salvation. It is an ugly thought, but inevitable, that such instances may not be rare. But may not that virtue we hold "too high and good for human nature's daily food"--may not even that be bought too dear? What an ugly complexion it would put upon our intolerant attitude to those fallen ones, if we dreamed for one moment that our immaculate virtue was preserved by their vice! It would be hard to ask us to renounce heaven, but if heaven for one meant hell for another, it were at least well for us not to blow the fire.
But Homer Wilson was not thinking of any generalizations; he was simply concerned with the debt he owed Myron Holder and how to pay it; for, and be it told with no thought of disparaging Homer Wilson, he felt he would bestow an inestimable benefit upon Myron Holder by making her his wife. He believed he would, at one blow, free her from the shackles of shame. He never thought of the woman-soul that strove to justify itself by rigid adherence to those vows that had seemed so sacred, uttered, as they were, by lips that were almost divine to the listening heart they had betrayed.