nd bears its blooms in the face of
heaven.

Why it is and what it means we shall perhaps never know for certain.
But it does suggest itself, that as the greatest terror of our being
lies in the utter loneliness, the unspeakable identity, and unchanging
self-completeness of every living creature, so the greatest hope and
the intensest natural yearning of our hearts go out towards that
passion which in its fire heats has the strength, if only for a little
while, to melt down the barriers of our individuality and give to the
soul something of the power for which it yearns of losing its sense of
solitude in converse with its kind. For alone we are from infancy to
death!--we, for the most part, grow not more near together but rather
wider apart with the widening years. Where go the sympathies between
the parent and the child, and where is the close old love of brother
for his brother?

The invisible fates are continually wrapping us round and round with
the winding sheets of our solitude, and none may know all our heart
save He who made it. We are set upon the world as the stars are set
upon the sky, and though in following our fated orbits we pass and
repass, and each shine out on each, yet are we the same lonely lights,
rolling obedient to laws we cannot understand, through spaces of which
none may mark the measure.

Only, as says the poet in words of truth and beauty:

"Only but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear;
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again--
And what we mean we say and what we would we know.

* * * * *

And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose
And the sea whereunto it goes."

Some such Indian summer of delight and forgetfulness of trouble, and
the tragic condition of our days, was now opening to Harold Quaritch
and Ida de la Molle. Every day, or almost every day, they met and went
upon their painting expeditions and argued the point of the validity
or otherwise of the impressionist doctrines of art. Not that of all
this painting came anything very wonderful, although in the evening
the Colonel would take out his canvases and contemplate their rigid
proportions with singular pride and sat