are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy.  A week before, his sister’s affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence.  The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him.  And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced.  How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering.  How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race?

Presently—­by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit—­his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator.  The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward—­towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests.  But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker—­a bystander.  Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,—­these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity.  But his interest in his particular role had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.

Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a repressed and hidden energy.  He had learnt in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want.  And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle.  The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone.  He had loved, and lost, and despaired.  Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them!  He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them.  The artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of sorrow and passion.  His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound,—­the answer of human tenderness to human need.