Coming home after so long, coming home, moreover, with a meaning portentous beyond the ordinary attached to the act, had excited Ishmael unknown to himself.  Physically he felt very tired, which he told himself was absurd, but mentally he was of a joyous alertness.  Leaning upon the stile, he drew a deep breath of the salt air and raised his eyes to the night sky curving, so high was he placed, for an immense arc about his tiny form.  To the north the Plough trailed its length, but south, high over the dark blot which to the keen sight of love meant Cloom, Spica, brilliant crown of Virgo, pulsed whitely, while the glittering sisterhood of Aquila and Lyra, Corona and Libra swept towards the east, ushering up the sky the slim young moon, as bright as they but more serene, like a young mother amidst a flock of heedless girls.  How often had Ishmael counted these same clear callous eyes from sleeping St. Renny, but never with the answering gleam in his breast that he felt now he saw them over his own land.

“So life is going to be good, after all,” remarked the Parson abruptly.

“Rather.  It seems jolly good to-night, anyway.  All my life I’ve been looking forward to this, just this, coming back here and making something of it all ... and the funny thing is now it’s come I’m not disappointed.”

“Why should you be?”

“I dunno.  Only one expects to be when one’s been expecting to be happy.  That sounds Irish, but you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know, but then I’m older than you.  Why should you have found that out?”

“Some things—­things like that—­one doesn’t find out by what happens.  One sort of knows them to start with.  It’s funny too, because what I’m so cock-a-hoop about to-night is that life’s so full of things just ahead, things that are going to happen.  I say, look at that moon; I sort of feel as though I could jump over her if only I tried hard enough!”

“That’s what youth lives on,” said Boase—­“not on what happens, but on what may happen.  Every morning when you wake don’t you feel—­’To-day It may happen,’ though you haven’t the vaguest idea what It may be?”

“Why, yes, I think that’s true,” said Ishmael slowly.

“Yes, it’s true.  It’s what youth and hope and courage lives by.”

“And old people—­what do they live by?”

“Ah, that everyone has to find out for himself.  It depends largely on what his middle-age has drawn on, and that’s nearly always something more material than what fed his youth.  There’s only one thing certain—­that we all have something, some secret bread of our own soul, by which we live, that nourishes and sustains us.  It may be a different thing for each man alive.”

“We must each work out our own damnation,” said Ishmael, and then could have kicked himself for his own smartness that he heard go jarring through the night.  He waited in a blush of panic for some reproof, such as “That was hardly worthy, was it?” But the Parson, ever nothing if not unexpected, did not administer it, though Ishmael could have sworn he felt his smile through the darkness.