ilt, lessened--lessened. To half. To a quarter. To a glistening line.
Then coppery darkness.

No one spoke. The flow of universes seemed to sweep personality out upon
eternal tides. Yet, strangely, Maurice felt a sudden uprush of
personality! ... Little he was--oh, infinitely little; too little, of
course, to be known by the Power that could do this--spread out the
heavens, and rule the deeps of Space; and yet he felt, somehow, near to
the Power. "It's what they call God, I suppose?" he said. It flashed
into his mind that he had said almost exactly the same thing that day in
the field (when he was a fool), of the fire of joy in his breast: he had
said that Happiness was God! And some people thought this stupendous
Energy could know--_us_? Absurd! "Might as well say a man could know an
ant." Yet, just because Inconceivable Greatness was great, mightn't it
know Inconceivable Littleness? "The smaller I am--the nastier, the
meaner, the more contemptible--the greater It would have to be to know
me? To say I was too little for It to know about, would be to set a
limit to Its greatness." How foolish Reason looks, limping along behind
such an intuition--Intuition, running and leaping, and praising God!
Maurice's reason strained to follow Intuition: "If It knows about me, It
could help me, ... because It holds the stars. Why! _It_ could fix
things--with Eleanor!" Looking up into the gulf, his tiny misery
suddenly fell away. "It would just prove Its greatness, to help me!"
While he groped thus for God among the stars, the order of rushing
worlds brought light, just as it had brought darkness: first a gleam;
then a curving thread; then a silver sickle; then, magnificently! a
shield of light--and the moon's unaltered face looked down at them.
Maurice had an overwhelming impulse to drop his weakness into endless,
ageless, limitless Power; his glimmer of self-knowledge, into enormous
All-Knowledge; his secrecy into Truth. An impulse to be done with
silences. "God knows; so Eleanor shall know." The idea of telling the
truth was to Maurice--slipping and sinking into bottomless lying--like
taking hold upon the great steadinesses of the sky....

People began to talk; Maurice did not hear them. Miss Ladd made a joke;
Miss Moore said something about "light miles"; the old, sad, clever
woman said, "The firmament showeth his handiwork,"--and instantly, as
though her words were a signal--a voice, as silvery as the moon, broke
the midnight wi