and round a third presence--not
wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his
revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so
to speak, of orientation. Thus in short he settled to live--feeding all
on the sense that he once _had_ lived, and dependent on it not alone for
a support but for an identity.

It sufficed him in its way for months and the year elapsed; it would
doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident,
superficially slight, which moved him, quite in another direction, with a
force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India. It was a thing
of the merest chance--the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair, though
he was indeed to live to believe that if light hadn't come to him in this
particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to live
to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, I may not less
definitely mention, to do much else. We allow him at any rate the
benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him at the end, that,
whatever might have happened or not happened, he would have come round of
himself to the light. The incident of an autumn day had put the match to
the train laid from of old by his misery. With the light before him he
knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered. It was
strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed. And
the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortal. This face, one
grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into
Marcher's own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a
blade. He felt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady
thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had
noticed, on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance
away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor would
probably match it for frankness. This fact alone forbade further
attention, though during the time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious
of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed
back, among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews, was constantly
presented. Marcher's theory that these were elements in contact with
which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occasion, it may be
granted, a marked, an excessive check. The autumn day was dire for him
as none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had not