There was no sign of a returning sail, and he resumed his study of the sumptuous sky, the colors of which were now deepening and burning with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds of the deepest purple hue, swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as though to form his footstool.
"One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded, and that all this aerial pomp,--this strange silence,--was just the pause, the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet at heart, he was much more of a cynic.

He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate.

And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight,--something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens, as compared with the referential and seemingly worshipping silence of the earth,--that, for a few moments, awed him into a sense of the spiritual and unseen.

Mythical passages from the poets he loved came into his memory, and stray fragments of old songs and ballads he had known in his childhood returned to him with haunting persistence.

It was, for him, one of those sudden halts in life which we all experience,--an instant,--when time and the world seem to stand still, as though to permit us easy breathing; a brief space,--in which we are allowed to stop and wonder awhile at the strange unaccountable force within us, that enables us to stand with such calm, smiling audacity, on our small pin's point of the present, between the wide dark gaps of past and future; a small hush,--in which the gigantic engines of the universe appear to revolve no more, and the immortal Soul of man itself is subjected and over-ruled by supreme and eternal Thought.