The only place where he hardened his heart was in the hospital with Holmes.  After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles thought the man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day, cold and grave, as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were enough for him.  Did he understand the iron fate laid on him?  Where was the strength of the self-existent soul now?  Did he know that it was a balked, defeated life, that waited for him, vacant of the triumphs he had planned?  “The self-existent soul! stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent deity,—­the chance burning of a mill!” Knowles muttered to himself, looking at Holmes.  With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether there might not, after all, be a Something,—­some deep of calm, of eternal order, where these coarse chances, these wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian, even that namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be unconsciously working out their part.  Looking out of the hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue, impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the maddest raging of the petty world.  There was such calm! such infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him, it held the world,—­all Wrong, all Right!  For an instant the turbid heart of the man cowered, awe-struck, as yours or mine has done when some swift touch of music or human love gave us a cleaving glimpse of the great I AM.  The next, he opened the newspaper in his hand.  What part in the eternal order could that hold? or slavery, or secession, or civil war?  No harmony could be infinite enough to hold such discords, he thought, pushing the whole matter from him in despair.  Why, the experiment of self-government, the problem of the ages, was crumbling in ruin!  So he despaired just as Tige did the night the mill fell about his ears, in full confidence that the world had come to an end now, without hope of salvation,—­crawling out of his cellar in dumb amazement, when the sun rose as usual the next morning.

Knowles sat, peering at Holmes over his paper, watching the languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before.  He fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed the soul of this man:  would he struggle out?  Would he take Miss Herne as the first step in his stairway, or be content to be flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty?  He could not tell if the quiet on Holmes’s face were stolid defiance or submission:  the dumb kings might have looked thus beneath the feet of Pharaoh.  When he walked over the floor, too, weak as he was, it was with the old iron tread.  He asked Knowles presently what business he had gone into.

“My old hobby in an humble way,—­the House of Refuge.”

They both laughed.

“Yes, it is true.  The janitor points me out to visitors as ‘under-superintendent, a philanthropist in decayed circumstances.’  Perhaps it is my life-work,”—­growing sad and earnest.