stant unaware of it. I sometimes think there is nothing else
left of me; and then this happens, and I see that I have not gone deep
enough yet."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, smiling, "life is like the sea, I think. When
one is a child, it is just a great plain of waters, with little ships
sailing on it: it is pleasant to play by, with breaking waves to wade
in, and little treasures thrown up on its rim; then, as one knows more,
one realises that it is another world, full of its own urgent life,
quite regardless of man, and over which man has no power, except by a
little trickery in places. Man is just a tiresome, far-off incident,
his ships like little moving shadows, his nets and lines like small
fretful devices. But the old wise monsters of the depths live their own
lives; never seen perhaps, or even suspected, by men. That's all very
silly and fanciful, of course! But old and invalided as I am, I seem to
be diving deeper and deeper into life, and finding it full of surprises
and mysteries and utterly unexpected things."

"Well," said Howard, "I am still a child on the shore, picking up
shells, fishing in the shallows. But I have learned something of late,
and it is wonderful beyond thought--so wonderful that I feel sometimes
as if I was dreaming, and should wake up to find myself in some other
century!"

It did indeed soon dawn upon Howard that there was a change in Maud,
that their relations had somehow altered and deepened. The little
barrier of age, for one thing, which he had sometimes felt, seemed
obliterated. There had been in Howard's mind a sense that he had known
a number of hard facts and ugly features about life, had been aware of
mean, combative, fierce, cruel elements which were hidden from Maud.
Now this all seemed to be purged away; if these things were there, they
were not worth knowing, except to be disregarded. They were base
material knowledge which one must not even recognise; they were not
real forces at all, only ugly, stubborn obstacles, through which life
must pass, like water flowing among rocks; they were not life, only the
channel of life, through which one passed to something more free and
generous. He began to perceive that such things mattered nothing at all
to Maud; that her life would have been just as fine in quality if she
had lived in the smallest cottage among the most sordid cares. He saw
that she possessed the wisdom which he had missed, because she lived in
and for emotion and a