so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the
servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on
the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is
as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the Christmas
streets! Shall I help you--I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to
find the money?"

"For what price?" asked Markheim.

"I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.
"No," said he, "I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of
thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should
find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing
to commit myself to evil."

"I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the visitant.

"Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim cried.

"I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on these things from
a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man
has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion,
or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak
compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he
can add but one act of service: to repent, to die smiling, and thus
to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving
followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me; accept my help. Please
yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply,