ly see; as if there were some great secret
actually present and displayed in dead silence and invisibility before
those only who possessed the senses necessary to perceive it.

* * * * *

It was odd to regard life from this standpoint--to look back upon the
days and their incidents that were past, forward upon the days and
incidents to come. Again it was possible for Frank to look upon these
things as an outsider and a deliberate critic--as he had done in the
stuffy room of the lodging-house in the town. Yet now, though he was
again an outsider, though he was again out of the whirl of actual
living, he seemed to be looking at things--staring out, as he was,
almost unseeingly at the grass slopes before him--from exactly the
opposite side. Then, they had seemed to him the only realities, these
tangible physical things, and all else illusion: now it was the physical
things that were illusive, and something else that was real. Once again
the two elements of life lay detached--matter and spirit; but it was as
obviously now spirit that was the reality as it had been matter a day or
two before. It was obviously absurd to regard these outward things on
which he looked as anything but a frame of something completely
different. They were too silent, too still, too little self-sufficient
to be complete in themselves. Something solid lay embraced within
them....

So, then, he stared and ruminated, scarcely perceiving that he thought,
so intensely conscious was he of that of which he thought. It was not
that he understood anything of that on which he looked; he was but aware
that there was something to be understood. And the trees hung rigid
above him, and the clear blue sky still a hard stone beyond them, not
yet flushed with dawn; and the grass lay before him, contracted, it
seemed, with cold, and every blade soaked in wet; and the silence was
profound....

Then a cock crew, a mile away, a thin, brazen cry; a rabbit sat up, then
crouched and bolted, and the spell faded like a mist.

Frank turned and walked back under the trees, to see if the Major was
awake.

CHAPTER V

(I)

We are arrived now at one of those few deplorable incidents in Frank's
career, against which there is no defense. And the painful thing about
it is that Frank never seemed to think that it required any defense. He
shows no penitence for it in his diary: and yet moralists are united in
telling us that we must ne