on spell-bound for ever; he remembered that moment when, on his return to Cloom, he had gone over the fields with John-James and, looking once more on the same field, had recalled that first moment, and smiled to see how it had slipped away and was gone.  He had smiled without thinking that first moment akin to the second one in which he was, whereas now he saw how the one had led to the other and both to this ... and how they were all so much one that none seemed further off than another.  The word “present” lost significance in such a oneness as this.  It came to him that this sense of completeness, of inevitable pattern, was what the Parson felt, what enabled him to wait so tranquilly.

Ishmael mounted the long slope and stood looking down upon Cloom, and it seemed to him the fabric of a dream.  So strong upon him was the sense of loss of the time-sense that the place-sense also reeled and slipped to a different angle in his mind.  He saw how in a far-off field at the crest of the further slope serried rows of washing were laid out, looking so oddly like gravestones that the surface of his mind took it for a cemetery until, pricked to a more normal consciousness, he realised that there could be no such thing there, but only a field belonging to a farm of his own.  Even then it seemed to him that he was wandering in an unfamiliar country, with a something unreal about it that gave it a dreamlike quality.  The sky was by now a deep slate colour; below it the yellow of the road and the green of the fields showed a bleached pallor, and on the telegraph poles that rose and dipped to the crest the china insulators looked like motionless white birds against the darkness.  He went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them.  He knew it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace—­rather it sent a chill of helplessness to his heart.  He still wanted something in this world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived.

CHAPTER VI

“SOMETHING MUST COME TO ALL OF US”

With autumn Boase died.  Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss.  He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few of the country people too coarse of grain to understand a man’s life could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made for him intolerant critics among his own class.  Yet, all in all, he was as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding,