From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had looked upon the face of his living child--the hours of his profoundest emotion, his completest reconciliation.

He had never regarded himself as an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself had gone out into the void.

For the first time he had come to the deeper reality of life--through the flowing of the agonised longing within himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human longings are but detached and wandering forms.

From that time death had held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere animal responsibility.

The boy who had died was for him in a close, an intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily companionship with his thoughts.
Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye for the invisible beauty.