a child indeed at a mother's knee; "we all come
home thus, sooner or later; and the time has come for you. I knew it
the moment I opened your letter. He is at the gate, I said, and I may
have the joy of being beside him when the door is opened."

V

ON THE DOWN

Howard was very singularly impressed by this talk. It seemed to him,
not certainly indeed, but possibly, that he had stumbled, almost as it
were by accident, upon a great current of force and emotion running
vehemently through the world, under the calm surface of things. How
many apparently unaccountable events it might explain! one saw frail
people doing fine things, sensitive people bearing burdens of
ill-health or disappointment, placidly and even contentedly, men making
gallant, unexpected choices, big expansive natures doing dull work and
living cheerfully under cramped conditions. He had never troubled to
explain such phenomena, beyond thinking that for some reason such a
course of action pleased and satisfied people. Of course everyone did
not hide the struggle; there were men he knew who had a grievance
against the world, for ever parading a valuation of themselves with
which no one concurred. But there were many people who had the material
for far worse grievances, who never seemed to nourish them. Had they
fought in secret and prevailed? Had they been floated into some moving
current of strength by a rising tide? Were they, like the man in the
Gospel, conscious of a treasure hidden in a field which made all other
prizes tame by comparison? Was the Gospel in fact perhaps aiming at
that--the pearl of price? To be born again--was that what had happened?
The thought cast a light upon his own serene life, and showed him that
it was essentially a pagan sort of life, temperate perhaps and refined,
but still unlit by any secret fire. It was not that his life was wrong,
or that an abjuration was needed; it was still to be lived, and lived
more intently, but no longer merely self-propelled. . . .

He needed to be alone, to consider, to focus his thought; he went off
for a walk by himself among the hills, past the spring, up the valley,
till he came to a place where the down ran out into the plain, the
bluff crowned with a great earthwork. An enormous view lay spread out
before him. To left and right the smooth elbows of the uplands ran down
into the plain, their skirts clothed with climbing woods and orchards,
hamlets half-hidden, with the smoke goi