visit he paid, an astonishing visit, though the
astonishment, really, was not his; life had seemed deeply to have
promised something when he had ceased to think of death--when he had
ceased to want death, even. That strong beating of his heart had been a
mute forestalling. The astonishment was the good, great doctor's, and it
was reiterated with an emphasis that showed something of wounded
professional pride beneath it. It was, indeed, humiliating to have made
such a complete mistake, to have seen only one significance in symptoms
that, to far-sightedness clairvoyant enough, should have hinted, at all
events, at another, and, as a result, to have doomed to speedy death a
man now obviously as far from dying as oneself: "I can't forgive myself
for robbing you of a month of life," the doctor said. "A month with
death at the end of it can't be called a month of life."

"Very much of life," said Holland. "So much so that I hardly know yet
whether I am glad or sorry that you were mistaken."

He indeed hardly did know. All the way down in the train he was thinking
intently of the new complicated life that had been given back to him,
and of what he should do with it. At moments the thought seemed to
overwhelm him, to draw him into gulfs deeper than death's had been.

All through that month life had meant the moment only. The vistas and
horizons seemed now to open and flash and make him dizzy. How could he
take up again the burden of far ends and tangled purposes? The dust of
coming conflicts seemed to rise to his nostrils. Life was perilous and
appalling in its fluctuating immensity.

But, with all the disillusion and irony of his new experience, with all
the unwholesome languor that had unstrung his will, some deeper wisdom,
also, had been given him. He could turn from the nightmare vision that
saw time as eternity.

The walk in the night had brought a message. He could not say it, nor
see it clearly, but the sense of its presence was like the coolness and
freshness of wings fanning away fevers and nightmare. Somewhere there it
hovered, the significance of the message, somewhere in those allied yet
contrasted thoughts of eternity and time.

There had been his mistake, his and Kitty's, the mistake that had meant
irony and lassitude and corruption. To heap all time into the moment, to
make a false eternity of it, was to arrest something, to stop blood from
flowing, thought from growing, was to create a nightmare distortion,