The sun was shining when he awoke; but with returning consciousness came memory and pain, and the old cowardly desire to escape all the consequences of his sin by death. He vowed he would not live to see another day, and once more he commenced brooding over the one question, how he would die. As he took up this question where he had dropped it the previous night, the thought occurred to him what a long respite he had had from pain. Then like a flash of lightning came another thought: "Suppose by my self-destroying act I pass into a condition of life in which there is no sleep, and memory can torture without cessation, without respite? True, I have tried to believe there is no future life, but am I sure of it? Here I can obtain a little rest. For hours I have been unconscious, through the weight of the body upon my spirit. How can I be sure that the spirit cannot exist separately and suffer just the same? I am not suffering now through my body, and have not been through all these terrible days. My body is here in this cell, inert and motionless, painless, while in my mind I am enduring the torments of the damned. The respite from suffering that I have had has come through the weariness of my body, and here I am planning to cast down the one barrier that perhaps saves me from an eternity of torturing thought and memory."
He was appalled at the bare possibility of such a future; reason told him that such a future was probable, and conscience told him that it was before him in veritable truth. He felt that wherever he carried memory and his present character he would be most miserable, whether it were in Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise, or the heaven or hell of the Bible.
There was no more thought of suicide. Indeed, he shrank from death with inexpressible dread.
Slowly his thoughts turned to his wife, the woman who had been so true to him, the one human being of all the world who now stood by him. She might help him in his desperate strait. She seemed to have a principle within her soul which sustained her, and which might sustain him. At any rate, he longed to see her once more, and ask her forgiveness in deep contrition for his base and lifelong failure to "love, honor, and cherish her," as he had promised at God's altar and before many witnesses.
The devoted wife came and patiently entered on her ministry of love and Christian faith, and out of the chaos of the fallen man of iron and stone there gradually emerged a new man, who first became in Christ's expressive words "a little child" in spiritual things, that he might grow naturally and in the symmetry of the enduring manhood which God designs to perfect in the coming ages.