lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and
day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?"

"Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is."

"It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and
done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers, but not
one of them was worth living; they were charged full with miseries and
disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave deed twelve
days from now--a deed begun and ended in six minutes--and get for all
reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told you of. It
is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said that
sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour's happiness and
self-satisfaction is paid for--or punished--by years of suffering."

I wondered what poor little Lisa's early death would save her from. He
answered the thought:

"From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from
nineteen years' pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at
the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother
would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her mother?"

"Yes--oh, indeed yes; and wiser."

"Father Peter's case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted,
through unassailable proofs of his innocence."

"Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?"