till unbroken, like a crystal wall all round you. I think
you will have to suffer; but you will believe, will you not, that you
have not seen a half of the wonder of life? You are full of happy
experience, but you have begun to feel the larger need. And I knew that
when you began to feel that need, you would be brought to me, not to be
given it, but to be shown it. That is all I can say to you now, but you
will know the fulness of life. It is not experience, action, curiosity,
ambition, desire, as many think, that is fulness of life; those are
delusions, things through which the soul has to pass, just that it may
learn not to rest in them. The fulness of life is the stillest,
quietest, inner joy, which nothing can trouble or shadow; love is a
part of it, but not quite all--for there is a shadow even in love; and
this is the larger peace."

Howard sat amazed at the fire and glow of the words that came to him.
He did not fully understand all that was said, but he had a sense of
being brought into touch with a very tremendous and overwhelming force
indeed. But he could not for the moment revise his impressions; he only
perceived that he had come unexpectedly upon a calm and radiating
centre of energy, and it seemed in his mind that the pool which he had
seen that morning was an allegory of what he had now heard. The living
water, breaking up so clearly from underground in the grassy valley,
and passing downwards to gladden the earth! It would be used, be
tainted, be troubled, but he saw that no soil or stain, no scattering
or disruption, could ever really intrude itself into that elemental
purity. The stream would reunite itself, the impregnable atom would let
the staining substance fall unheeded. He would have to consider all
that, scrutinise his life in a new light. He felt that he had been
living on the surface of things, relying on impression, living in
impression, missing the strong central current all the time. He rose,
and taking his aunt's hand, kissed her cheek.

"Those are my thanks!" he said smiling. "I can't express my gratitude,
but you have given me so much to think about and to ponder over that I
can say no more now. I do indeed feel that I have missed what is
perhaps the greatest thing in the world. But I ask myself, Can I attain
to this, is it for me? Am I not condemned by temperament to live in the
surface-values?"

"No, dear child," said Mrs. Graves, looking at him, so that for an
instant he felt like