saying? "Keep faith, my son! ay! but keep it with your wife too, the
child you wedded whether she would or no, and from whom you are taking
the joy of childhood, the light of youth. Keep faith as the sun keeps
it, as the summer keeps it, not as winter and the night."

What did that mean? keep faith with her, with his wife? how else should
he do it but by saving her from the wrath to come, by plucking her as a
flower out of the mire?

"What shall I save but her soul, yea, though her body perish?"

He spoke out in his trouble, and the vision seemed to shrink and waver
under his gaze; but the faint voice sighed again,--or was it only the
wind in the pine-trees?--"Care thou for her earthly life, her earthly
joy, for God is mindful of her soul."

But then the deeper note struck in again,--or was it only a stronger
gust, that bowed the branches, and murmured through all the airy depths
above him?

"Keep the faith! Thou art a man, and wilt thou be drawn away by women,
of whom the best are a stumbling-block and a snare for the feet?
Destroy the evil thing! root it out from thy house! What are joys of
this world, that we should think of them? Do they not lead to
destruction, even the flowery path of it, going down to the mouth of
the pit, and with no way leading thence? Who is the woman for whose
sake thou wilt lose thine own soul? If thy right eye offend thee,
pluck it out!"

So the night went on, and the voices, or the wind, or his own soul,