omen look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the trick
even his pity learned, fastening those who suffered in anywise to his
affections by a kind of sensible attachments. He would think of
Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom
of his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early
dead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women's
voices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of the
turning of the child's flesh to violets in the turf above him. And
thinking of the very poor, it was not the things which most men care
most for that he yearned to give them; [188] but fairer roses, perhaps,
and power to taste quite as they will, at their ease and not
task-burdened, a certain desirable, clear light in the new morning,
through which sometimes he had noticed them, quite unconscious of it,
on their way to their early toil.

So he yielded himself to these things, to be played upon by them like a
musical instrument, and began to note with deepening watchfulness, but
always with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his enjoyment, the
phases of the seasons and of the growing or waning day, down even to
the shadowy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiling--the light cast up
from the snow, bringing out their darkest angles; the brown light in
the cloud, which meant rain; that almost too austere clearness, in the
protracted light of the lengthening day, before warm weather began, as
if it lingered but to make a severer workday, with the school-books
opened earlier and later; that beam of June sunshine, at last, as he
lay awake before the time, a way of gold-dust across the darkness; all
the humming, the freshness, the perfume of the garden seemed to lie
upon it--and coming in one afternoon in September, along the red gravel
walk, to look for a basket of yellow crab-apples left in the cool, old
parlour, he remembered it the more, and how the colours struck upon
him, because a wasp on one bitten apple stung him, and he felt the
passion of [189] sudden, severe pain. For this too brought its curious
reflexions; and, in relief from it, he would wonder over it--how it had
then been with him--puzzled at the depth of the charm or spell over
him, which lay, for a little while at least, in the mere absence of
pain; once, especially, when an older boy taught him to make flowers of
sealing-wax, and he had burnt his hand badly at the lighted taper, and
b