As he stood there by her grave, measuring this deep and tragic experience with his new divining rod of sympathy, there rushed upon him an overmastering desire to reveal his appreciation to that suffering heart beyond the skies.  A feeling of bitterness at his inability to do this frenzied him; a new consciousness of the irony of life in permitting him to make these discoveries when they could do her no good plunged him suddenly into a struggle with the darker problems of being which for a little while had ceased to vex him.

“Do all the appreciations of heroism come too late?” he asked his sad heart.  “Do we acquire wisdom only when we, can no longer be guided by it?  Do we achieve self-mastery and real virtue only to be despised by our children?  Where is the clue to this tangle?  Oh! mother, mother, if I could only have one single hour to ask thee what thou didst learn about this awful mystery in those lonely years of struggle!  If I could only tell thee of my penitence, of my admiration, my love!  But it is too late—­too late.”

With this despairing cry on his lips, he flung himself upon the grave, buried his face in the green turf and burst into a convulsive passion of tears, such tears as come once or twice, perhaps, in the lives of most men, when they are passing through the awful years of adjustment to the incomprehensible and apparently chaotic experiences of existence.

Like a thunderstorm, these convulsions clear the atmosphere and give relief to the strained tension of the soul.  At length, when his emotion had spent itself in long-drawn sighs, David rose in a calm and tender frame of mind, plucked a bunch of violets from the grave and reluctantly turned away.

On foot, and leading his horse, he entered a quiet and secluded path which led past the rear of the farm.  He had not consciously determined what he should do next; but his heart impelled him irresistibly toward that little bridge where he had encountered Pepeeta on his return from the lumber camp.  It was at that place and that hour, perhaps, that he had passed through the deepest experience of his whole life, for it was there that the full power of the beauty of the woman in whom he had met his destiny had burst upon him, and it was there that for the first time he had consciously surrendered himself to those rich emotions which love enkindles in the soul.

Perhaps our spiritual enjoyments are capable of an ever-increasing development and intensity; but those pleasures that belong to the earthly life and are excited by the things of time and sense, however often they may recur, by an inviolable law of nature attain their climax in some one single experience, just as there is in the passage of a star across the sky a single climactic moment, and in the life of a rose an instant when it reaches its most transcendent beauty.  They all attain their zenith and then begin to wane; that one brilliant but transitory instant of perfect bliss can no more be recalled than the passing stroke of a bell, the vanished glory of a sunset, or the last sigh of a dying friend; and many of the vainest and most unsatisfying struggles of life are expended in the effort to reproduce that one evanescent and forevermore impossible ecstasy.