“That feeds my soul from which my soul came ...” he said slowly, “and daily the vision draws nearer to me and its reflection here strengthens even to my earthly eyes.  This world is dear and sweet, but only because I know that it is not all, or even the most important part.  Each day is the sweeter to me because each day I can say ’Come quickly, O Lord Jesus.’  I do not need to say to you all that knowledge means.”

The rain had blown away when Ishmael went home again, yet it seemed to him he went with a more anxious heart than that with which he had set out.  Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already, whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him that no one could ever take his place.  Killigrew he was missing as much now as when he died, because though he had not seen him so very often, yet Killigrew and he had each stood for something to the other that no one else could quite supply, and so his going had left a sense of loss that time did nothing to fill.  But with Boase it was more than that.  There was something in Ishmael which Boase had fathered and which knew and recognised its spiritual paternity.  His mind had taken much colour from Killigrew, but from Boase it had taken form.  He felt that that afternoon in the stuffy study he had touched something he had almost forgotten, that had slipped rather out of his life for the past years, since Nicky had been growing up:  a significance, a sense of some plan of which he had caught glimpses in his youth and had since forgotten.

As he went through the wet world it seemed to him as though he were once again the same Ishmael who had so often gone this way long years ago, when the soul behind life had still intrigued him more than the manifestations of life itself.  Whether it was that that afternoon in the study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere material agencies of the sense of smell and sight:  or whether the Parson had touched him in some atrophied cord that had rung more freely in days gone by, the effect was the same.

As he went it was as though time had ceased to exist, as though he caught some vision of the whole pattern as one rhythmic weaving, and not isolated bits disconnected with each other.  The sensation mounted to his brain and told him that time itself was a mere fashion of thought, that he was walking in some period he could not place.  He remembered the day when the Neck had been cried, and it had seemed to him that the moment was so acute it could never leave off being the present and slip into the past; he remembered the first day at St. Renny when he was staring at the sunbeam and feeling that that at least would go