And in a flash he saw what he had, all unknowingly, lived by since the decline of his powers had fallen upon swiftness, and he saw it as what alone makes life bearable.  He had lived by the knowledge of death, by the blessed certainty that life could not go on for ever, that there must be an end to all the wanderings and pain, to all the dulnesses and unsatisfactory driftings, to all the joys that would otherwise fall upon sluggishness or cloy themselves.  This it was that gave its fine edge to pleasure, its sweet sharpness to happiness, and their possible solace to pain and grief.  He had lived, as all men do, knowingly or not, by death.  This was the secret bread that all men shared.

Again came that period of unconsciousness which corresponded to night, and the third day dawned.  Again his brain felt of a crystal clearness; he was undistressed by the fact he could not speak to those around him or even return the pressure of their hands, for he was feeling all the old intoxicating joy of discovery at breaking into new lands.  He even felt a mischievous elation that all this secret pageant, this retrospective wonder that was life, should be his to watch and enjoy, while all around thought him past emotion already.

If, then, men lived by death, what was death?  Not a mere cessation—­then a going-on....  He made no definite images of it in his mind, did not even wonder whether he should see those others he had known and loved who had passed into these tracts before him.  That seemed to him now, as it always had when he had thought of it, rather unimportant.  What mattered, he had always known, was the adjustment of the soul to something beyond it, to which it and the whole of life stood in inextricably close and vital relationship.  Those other relationships, those other meetings, might be included in that as an added pleasure, but the other thing, if there at all, would necessarily be of such supreme importance as in its bright light to drown all minor effulgence.  And that it was there, always, in this world and the next, he knew, for he had always felt his soul breathe it as surely as his lungs had inhaled the free airs of the earth.  That the first meeting with it might not be all happiness, that as, in the Parson’s creed, inevitable pains would have to be worked through before the soul could be sufficiently purged to meet it clearly upon its ultimate levels, mattered very little.  At least, the pains would be different pains, not the same old wearying ones of earth—­the disappointments and the mortifications, the burning anxieties and the bitter losses, the overwhelming physical disasters, that everyone had to go through sooner or later.

It lay before him, not as a darkness, but a brightness, that he knew.  He felt an exquisite easing, even of the very muscles of his stricken body, as he thought of it—­a brightness which every soul went to swell, which gained a glowing, luminous pulse of light from each one that slipped into its shining spaces....