He fell away into meditation, mournful as it was indefinite, while the classic lament of another age and race formed itself silently upon his lips.
"_Comprehenderunt me iniquitates meae, et non potui ut viderem.
Multiplicatae sunt super capillos capitis mei; et cor meum dereliquit me_," he quoted, in the plenitude of his existing discouragement.
At his time of life, he told himself, earth held no future; and in heaven--as the Churches figure it--namely, an adjustment of the balance on the other side death, his belief was of the smallest.

A sea of uncertainty, vast, limitless, laps the shores of the meagre island of the present--which is all we actually have to our count.

Faith is a gift .-- You possess it, or you possess it not; yet without it-- But here his attention was caught, and brought home to that very present, by a movement upon the bed and Damaris' voice, asking tremulously: "Commissioner Sahib are you angry, too angry to speak to me ?" Whereupon Charles Verity got up, gathered back the curtain stuffing it in between the head board and the wall, and stood, tall, spare, yet graceful, looking down at her.

Whether from fatigue or from emotion, his expression was softer, his face less keen than usual, and the likeness between him and Darcy Faircloth proportionately and notably great.
"No, my dear," he said, "why should I be angry?
What conceivable right have I to be angry?
As a man sows so does he reap.

I only reap to-day what I sowed eight or nine-and-twenty years ago--a crop largely composed of tares, though among those tares I do find some modicum of wheat.