It amused him to say to himself that he might for all the world have been going to die--die resignedly; the scene was filled for him with so deep a death-bed hush, so melancholy a charm.

That meant the postponement of everything else--which made so for the quiet lapse of life; and the postponement in especial of the reckoning to come--unless indeed the reckoning to come were to be one and the same thing with extinction.

It faced him, the reckoning, over the shoulder of much interposing experience--which also faced him; and one would float to it doubtless duly through these caverns of Kubla Khan.

It was really behind everything; it hadn't merged in what he had done; his final appreciation of what he had done--his appreciation on the spot--would provide it with its main sharpness.

The spot so focussed was of course Woollett, and he was to see, at the best, what Woollett would be with everything there changed for him.