Then he remembered and understood....  It was Pentecost then!  And with memory a shred of reflection came back.  Where then was the wind, and the flame, and the earthquake, and the secret voice?  Yet the world was silent, rigid in its last effort at self-assertion:  there was no tremor to show that God remembered; no actual point of light, yet, breaking the appalling vault of gloom that lay over sea and land to reveal that He burned there in eternity, transcendent and dominant; not even a voice; and at that he understood yet more.  He perceived that that world, whose monstrous parody his sleep had presented to him in the night, was other than that he had feared it to be; it was sweet, not terrible; friendly, not hostile; clear, not stifling; and home, not exile.  There were presences here, but not those gluttonous, lustful things that had looked on him last night....  He dropped his head again upon his hands, at once ashamed and content; and again he sank down to depths of glimmering inner peace....

* * * * *

Not again, for a while, did he perceive what he did or thought, or what passed there, five yards away on the low step.  Once only a ripple passed across that sea of glass, a ripple of fire and sound like a rising star that flicks a line of light across a sleeping lake, like a thin thread of vibration streaming from a quivering string across the stillness of a deep night—­and be perceived for an instant as in a formless mirror that a lower nature was struck into existence and into union with the Divine nature at the same moment....  And then no more again but the great encompassing hush, the sense of the innermost heart of reality, till he found himself kneeling at the rail, and knew that That which alone truly existed on earth approached him with the swiftness of thought and the ardour of Divine Love....

Then, as the mass ended, and he raised his passive happy soul to receive the last gift of God, there was a cry, a sudden clamour in the passage, and a man stood in the doorway, gabbling Arabic.

III

Yet even at that sound and sight his soul scarcely tightened the languid threads that united it through every fibre of his body with the world of sense.  He saw and heard the tumult in the passage, frantic eyes and mouths crying aloud, and, in strange contrast, the pale ecstatic faces of those princes who turned and looked; even within the tranquil presence-chamber of the spirit where two beings, Incarnate God and all but Discarnate Man, were locked in embrace, a certain mental process went on.  Yet all was still as apart from him as a lighted stage and its drama from a self-contained spectator.  In the material world, now as attenuated as a mirage, events were at hand; but to his soul, balanced now on reality and awake to facts, these things were but a spectacle....

He turned to the altar again, and there, as he had known it would be, in the midst of clear light, all was at peace:  the celebrant, seen as through molten glass, adored as He murmured the mystery of the Word-made-Flesh, and once more passing to the centre, sank upon His knees.