He had seen the good man's lips tremble at some materialistic words he had once used in their many talks, and he wrote: "Lips that now tremble, Do you dissemble When you deny that the human is best ?-- Love, the evangel, Finds the Archangel?
Is that a truth when this may be a jest?
"Star-drifts that glimmer Dimmer and dimmer, What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
Was I born under The sun or the thunder?
What do I come from?
and where do I go?
"Rest, shall it ever Come?
Is endeavour But a vain twining and twisting of cords?
Is faith but treason; Reason, unreason, But a mechanical weaving of words ?" He thought of Louis Trudel, in his grave, and his own questioning: "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailorman!" and he wrote: "What is the token, Ever unbroken, Swept down the spaces of querulous years, Weeping or singing That the Beginning Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears ?" He made an involuntary motion of his hand to his breast, where old Louis Trudel had set a sign.

So long as he lived, it must be there to read: a shining smooth scar of excoriation, a sacred sign of the faith he had never been able to accept; of which he had never, indeed, been able to think, so distant had been his soul, until, against his will, his heart had answered to the revealing call in a woman's eyes.

He felt her fingers touch his breast as they did that night the iron seared him; and out of this first intimacy of his soul he wrote: "What is the token?
Bruised and broken, Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
Shall then the worst things Come to the first things, Finding the best of all, last of all, God ?" Like the cry of his "Aphrodite," written that last afternoon of the old life, this plaint ended with the same restless, unceasing question.

But there was a difference.

There was no longer the material, distant note of a pagan mind; there was the intimate, spiritual note of a mind finding a foothold on the submerged causeway of life and time.
As he folded up the paper to put it into his pocket, Jo Portugais entered the room.