..

Having sent Flora to bed, Felix was sitting up among his books. There
was no need to do this, for the young folk had latch-keys, but, having
begun the vigil, he went on with it, a volume about Eastern philosophies
on his knee, a bowl of narcissus blooms, giving forth unexpected whiffs
of odor, beside him. And he sank into a long reverie.

Could it be said--as was said in this Eastern book--that man's life was
really but a dream; could that be said with any more truth than it had
once been said, that he rose again in his body, to perpetual life? Could
anything be said with truth, save that we knew nothing? And was that not
really what had always been said by man--that we knew nothing, but were
just blown over and about the world like soughs of wind, in obedience to
some immortal, unknowable coherence! But had that want of knowledge ever
retarded what was known as the upward growth of man? Had it ever stopped
man from working, fighting, loving, dying like a hero if need were? Had
faith ever been anything but embroidery to an instinctive heroism, so
strong that it needed no such trappings? Had faith ever been anything
but anodyne, or gratification of the aesthetic sense? Or had it really
body and substance of its own? Was it something absolute and solid,
that he--Felix Freeland--had missed? Or again, was it, perhaps, but the
natural concomitant of youth, a naive effervescence with which thought
and brooding had to part? And, turning the page of his book, he noticed
that he could no longer see to read, the lamp had grown too dim, and
showed but a decorative glow in the bright moonlight flooding through
the study window. He got up and put another log on the fire, for these
last nights of May were chilly.

Nearly three! Where were these young people? Had he been asleep,
and they come in? Sure enough, in the hall Alan's hat and Sheila's
cloak--the dark-red one he had admired when she went forth--were lying
on a chair. But of the other two--nothing! He crept up-stairs. Their
doors were open. They certainly took their time--these young lovers. And
the same sore feeling which had attacked Felix when Nedda first told
him of her love came on him badly in that small of the night when his
vitality was lowest. All the hours she had spent clambering about him,
or quietly resting on his knee with her head tucked in just where his
arm and shoulder met, listening while he read or told her stories, and
now and again turning those c