a moment, with cries of surprise and pleasure; but to Howard it had meant much more than that; the current gave him a sense of awful force and potency, the potency of death.  What was this strange and fearful essence which could pass instantaneously through a group—­swifter even than thought—­and leave the nerves for a moment paralysed and tingling?  Even so it was with him now.  What was happening to him he did not know—­some vast and cloudy presence, at which he could not even dare to look, seemed winging its way overhead, the passage of which he could only dimly discern, as a man might discern the flight of an eagle in a breeze-ruffled mountain pool.

He had come in contact with a force of incalculable energy and joy, which was different, not in degree but in kind, from all previous emotional experiences.  He understood for the first time the meaning of words like “mystical” and “spiritual,” words which he had hitherto almost derided as unintelligent descriptions of subjective impressions.  He had thought them to be terms expressive of vague and even muddled emotions of which scientific psychology would probably dispose.  It was a new element and a new force, of which he felt overwhelmingly certain, though he could offer no proof, tangible or audible, of its existence.  He had before always demanded that anyone who attempted to uphold the existence of any psychic force should at the same time offer an experimental test of its actuality.  But he was here faced with an experience transcendental and subjective, of which he could give no account that would not sound like some imaginative exaggeration.  He was not even sure that Maud felt it, or rather he suspected that the experience of wedded love was to her the heightening and emphasizing of something which she had always known.

The essence of it was that it was like the inrush of some moving tide through an open sluice-gate.  Till then it seemed to him that his emotions had been tranquilly discharging themselves, like the water which drips from the edge of a fountain basin; that now something stronger and larger seemed to flow back upon him, something external and prodigious, which at the same time seemed, not only to invade and permeate his thought but to become one with himself; that was the wonder; it did not seem to him like something added to his spirit, but as though his soul were enlarged and revived by a force which was his own all the time, an unclaimed, unperceived part of himself.

He said something of this to Maud, speaking of the happiness that she had brought him.  She said, “Ah, you can’t expect me to realise that!  I feel as though you were giving everything and receiving nothing, as if I were one more of the duties you had adopted.  Of course, I hope that I may be of some use, some time; but I feel at present as if you had been striding on your way somewhere, and had turned aside to comfort and help a little child by the roadside who had lost his way!”