umph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed. wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that bewildered him—the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for Flavilla—and Bella.
He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home here and in eternity.
It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required; if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again, he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the city, of which he had confessed his fear, back
He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body—suddenly frozen into a deathlike sleep—chilled with a vision, a premonition, the insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single space of his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.
The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease, catlike and silent;
