ughts, and
often, without his being able to trace the faintest sign of any action
in his own mental mechanism, his father's voice would wake him with an
interjection of, 'Exactly!' or 'That's the point, Paul!' There was no
sound, and yet the voice was there, and the old familiar Ayrshire accent
seemed to mark it as strongly as it had done in his father's lifetime.
It was all very well to deride it as a mere delusion; it was easy to
put it on one side for a moment and to stand over it in an intelligent
superiority, tracking it to its sources in some obscure action of nerve
and brain. But howsoever often he might eject belief from his mind, it
came back with a clinging, gentle insistence which would not be denied;
and little by little, though sorely against his will, he began to have a
sence of it. A verse of 'In Memoriam 'was often in his mind:

'How pure in heart, and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold,
Should be the man whose heart would hold
An hour's communion with the dead.'

He began at last to think that his own unfitness for such a communion
helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the
feeling of his father's nearness weighed more and more upon him.

Sitting at his tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the passage
of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced
to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and,
so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of
folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but
they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at
all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, but it was
not until he had reached the last recorded effort of memory that they
had laid a weight upon his shoulders. Now he knew that he had tied a
millstone about his neck; that he had permanently denied to himself all
the sweet and vivifying influences of the higher social life. Sometimes
detached from him, as though it watched from outside and waited for
further confessions from his memory, and sometimes seeming an intimate
part of him, as if it were a constituent of that desolate ache which
filled and possessed his soul, there was always there the image of the
gray old father, wistful, sagacious, patient--no ghost, but veritably
a haunting thought, and at last, in spite of all contention, as real to
him as his own hand