The Postmaster of Market Deignton by E. Phillips Oppenheim

I daresay that most of us, even those whose lives have been marked with little of the tragedy of life, carry in our hearts a sealed corner into which we never care to look, the memory of which we cannot even recall without a shudder. This walk home, and the long hours of the weary night which followed, will always remain such a memory with me.

It is dawn, and when the first faint flush of morning steals up from behind the hills yonder, I am still out, a wanderer around the silent, deserted town. A slight frost has hardened the ground, and a silvery-grey mantle has fallen upon the housetops and lies across the fields. The air is keen and crisp, full of a healthful buoyancy which many a time has had its effect upon my spirits. Even in this hour of my bitter sorrow it has some influence upon me. I find myself struggling once more with this load of abject and passionate despair. I try to tell myself that all is not yet lost. It was a parable, that hideous, loathsome story to which I listened last night. As yet no definite word has stamped it with the hall-mark of truth. I recall its weak points, its exaggerations, its tardy narration, and I strive hard to nerve myself towards resolute and absolute disbelief in it. What was my sin to merit so great a punishment as this? At such a crisis truth is naked of all reserve. I had listened to a woman who had flattered and tempted me; but on the threshold of sin I had turned back. In the grey twilight of that night whose end had been so hideous I had fled back to London, a conqueror. It was true that I had listened and dallied and hesitated, that I had suffered myself to drift towards evil, with my face turned resolutely and obstinately away. But, nevertheless, when the moment of trial arrived I had triumphed. Was it the justice of heaven, the justice of God, to bring upon me this awful retribution?