He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had strengthened—­the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had whispered to him....  What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after?  He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that curtain.  He went on passing again through his life, and he saw the harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase, when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes and working out of them had filled the hours—­still with Nicky as the chief personal interest.

In his childhood he had lived by what would happen in a far golden future, in his youth by what might happen any dawning day; but in his years of manhood, and from then till he began to feel the first oncoming of age, he had lived by what he did.  Then he came again to Georgie, and saw how insensibly he had been won to softer ways, though never to the glamour-ridden ways of first youth.  They had been sweet, those years, and the sweeter for the outside things—­the friendship with Killigrew that had vivified his life, the pleasant intermittent times with Judith, the renascence of intimacy with Boase and the growth of his children, growing away from him every year, but none the less to be loved for that.  What had he lived by during those years?  Not, consciously, by anything, except a mere going on and a determination to make the best of things, to get the most out of everything.  When the Parson died he had a glimpse of a world he had lost sight of since his youth, but not then could he give up this one sufficiently to do more than glimpse it.  And when Nicky was in South Africa he had suffered that second violent onslaught of the personal which racked him this way and that.  Vassie—­the horror that her death had held now seemed to him as empty of all save peace as Hilaria’s.  But all the while he had been living by what he found in that passionate moment when he stood, a man of sixty, at the top of the hill above the seaward valley and had seen the rainbow arching over Cloom and the distant sea.  Beauty, the actual joy of the world, that had been feeding his soul all the time, giving him those moments of ecstasy without which Killigrew had always said the soul could not be saved alive.  From that moment the slope of the ten years down to the present seemed so swift that he found his vision of them less clear than of preceding periods.  What of these last years, each of which was bringing him with, it seemed, such increasing momentum, towards the end?