“No more,” he thought on, “can Eternal Force outside of me move me, affect me, shake me.  The force in me is as eternal, as indestructible, as infinite, as the whole universal force.  What it is I am too.  The unknown Law that gives trend to Force is manifest in me as much as it is in the whole universe beside, yet no more than it is in the smallest atom that floats in the air, in the smallest living thing that swims in a drop of water.  I am a part of that which is infinite and eternal and which working through Man has made him conscious and given him a sense of things and filled him with grand ideals sublime as the universe itself.  None of us can escape the Law even if we would because we are part of the Law and because every act and every thought and every desire follows along in us to that which has gone before and to the influences around, just as the flight of a bullet is according to the weight of the bullet, and its shape, and the pressure, and the direction it was fired, and the wind.”

“It is as easy,” he dreamed on, “for the stars to rebel and start playing nine-pins with one another, as it is for any man to swerve one hair’s breadth from that which is natural for him to do, he being what he is and influences at any given time being what they are.  None of us can help anything.  We are all poor devils, within whom the human desire to love one another struggles with the brute desire to survive one another.  And the brute desire is being beaten down by the very Pain we cry out against and the human desire is being fostered in us all by the very hatreds that seem to oppose it.  And some day we shall all love one another and till then, I suppose, we must suffer for the Cause a little so that men may see by our suffering that, however unworthy we are, the Cause can give us courage to endure.”

“I must think that out when I have time,” he concluded, as the train slowed down at a stopping-place where his last fellow-passenger got out.  “I’ll probably have plenty of time soon,” he added, mentally, chuckling good-humouredly at his grim joke.  “It’s a pity, though, one doesn’t feel good always.  When a fellow gets into the thick of it, he gets hot and says things that he shouldn’t and does things, too, I reckon.”

He had not heeded the other passengers but now that he found himself alone in the carriage he got down his blankets and made his bed.  He took off his boots and coat as he had done in the park, stretched himself out on the seat, and slept at once the sleep of contentment.  For the first time in his life the jarring of the train did not make his head ache nor its perpetual rubble-double irritate and unnerve him.  He slept like a child as the train bore him onward, passing into sleep like a child, full of tenderness and love, slept dreamlessly and heavily, undisturbed, with the photo against his heart and the rose in his fingers and about his hands the hand-clasp of friends and on his cheeks the republican kiss as though his long-dead mother had pressed her lips there.