He dashed his clenched fist on the railing of the vessel. While he stood there, his mind ran back into the past. He lived over again those passionate days when he had won and betrayed a young, beautiful, impressionable girl. His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally his desertion of her. And then the whole subsequent series of adventures and disasters passed before him--a moving panorama of dishonor and crime! He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel. Nothing could have been more astonishing to him than the sudden activity of his conscience. It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he believed himself incapable of it. But suddenly a fierce and unendurable pang seized him. To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was startling indeed. He could not understand it. The pain seemed disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and horror with which it filled him! And this is an element in the moral life with which bad men forget to deal! Because conscience ceases to remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent. They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency--this abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder unobserved, but a breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation! If conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a tadpole! We are no more safe from it than from memory! Who can be sure that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive? The sweet perfume of a violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years! At a word, a look, a glance, conscience--abused, suppressed, despised, inoperative--may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment and despair!