important and effectual--if it were only practicable. As the sinners came
out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet
flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running
with the Magnetic Ointment--even redder!

The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a
house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed. And if its
inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the
big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces;
where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of petunias and
fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white
lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly
to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with
the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.

Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.




CHAPTER V

THE LIFE OF CRIME IS APPRAISED AND CHOSEN


It came to seem expedient to Bernal, however, in the first spring of his
new life, to make a final choice between early death and a life, of sin.
Matters came to press upon him, and since virtue was useful only to get
one into Heaven, it was not worth the effort unless one meant to die at
once. This was an alternative not without its lures, despite the warnings