Maurice, intolerably irked, had moved across to the parapet and was staring out over the city.  Below him spread the dim expanse of roofs and chimneys, with here and there the twinkle of light in an attic window.  Leaning on the coping and looking down, he thought of the humanity under the dark roofs:  a horizontal humanity—­everybody asleep!  The ugly fancy came to him that if that sleeping layer of bodies could be stirred up, there would be instantly a squirming mass of loathsome thoughts—­maggots of lust, and shame, and jealousy, and fear.  “My God! we’re a nasty lot,” he thought.

“Look!” a voice said at his shoulder.  He sighed, impatiently—­and looked.  Above him soared the abyss of space, velvet black, pricked faintly here and there by stars; and, riding high—­eternal and serene—­the Moon.

He heard Miss Moore say, “It’s beginning.” ...  And the solemn curve of the Shadow touched the great disk.  No one spoke:  they stood—­a handful of little human creatures, staring up into immensity; specks of consciousness on a whirling ball that was rushing forever into the void, and, as it rushed, its shadow, sweeping soundless through the emptiness of Space, touched the watching Moon ... and the broad plaque, silver gilt, lessened—­lessened.  To half.  To a quarter.  To a glistening line.  Then coppery darkness.

No one spoke.  The flow of universes seemed to sweep personality out upon eternal tides.  Yet, strangely, Maurice felt a sudden uprush of personality! ...  Little he was—­oh, infinitely little; too little, of course, to be known by the Power that could do this—­spread out the heavens, and rule the deeps of Space; and yet he felt, somehow, near to the Power.  “It’s what they call God, I suppose?” he said.  It flashed into his mind that he had said almost exactly the same thing that day in the field (when he was a fool), of the fire of joy in his breast:  he had said that Happiness was God!  And some people thought this stupendous Energy could know—­us?  Absurd!  “Might as well say a man could know an ant.”  Yet, just because Inconceivable Greatness was great, mightn’t it know Inconceivable Littleness?  “The smaller I am—­the nastier, the meaner, the more contemptible—­the greater It would have to be to know me?  To say I was too little for It to know about, would be to set a limit to Its greatness.”  How foolish Reason looks, limping along behind such an intuition—­Intuition, running and leaping, and praising God!  Maurice’s reason strained to follow Intuition:  “If It knows about me, It could help me, ... because It holds the stars.  Why! It could fix things—­with Eleanor!” Looking up into the gulf, his tiny misery suddenly fell away.  “It would just prove Its greatness, to help me!” While he groped thus for God among the stars, the order of rushing worlds brought light, just as it had brought darkness:  first a gleam; then a curving thread; then a silver sickle; then, magnificently! a shield of light—­and