filled the house where
they were sitting.... _"

Then he remembered and understood.... It was Pentecost then! And with
memory a shred of reflection came back. Where then was the wind, and the
flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice? Yet the world was
silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion: there was no tremor
to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the
appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He
burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice;
and at that he understood yet more. He perceived that that world, whose
monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other
than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly,
not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile. There were
presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked
on him last night.... He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once
ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering
inner peace....

* * * * *

Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what
passed there, five yards away on the low step. Once only a ripple passed
across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star
that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread
of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a
deep night--and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that
a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine
nature at the same moment.... And then no more again but the great
encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he
found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly
existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the
ardour of Divine Love....

Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive
the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage,
and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.

III

Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid
threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of
sense. He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and
mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces
of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil
presence-chamber