But still he sat in his chair in his bedroom, dazed.  One part of his soul was saying emphatically:  It serves you right.  It is nothing but right.  It serves everybody right who rushes enkindled through the street, and trusts implicitly in mankind and in the life-spirit, as if mankind and the life-spirit were a playground for enkindled individuals.  It serves you right.  You have paid about twelve pounds sterling for your lesson.  Fool, you might have known beforehand, and then you needn’t have paid at all.  You can ill afford twelve pounds sterling, you fool.  But since paid you have, then mind, mind the lesson is learned.  Never again.  Never expose yourself again.  Never again absolute trust.  It is a blasphemy against life, is absolute trust.  Has a wild creature ever absolute trust?  It minds itself.  Sleeping or waking it is on its guard.  And so must you be, or you’ll go under.  Sleeping or waking, man or woman, God or the devil, keep your guard over yourself.  Keep your guard over yourself, lest worse befall you.  No man is robbed unless he incites a robber.  No man is murdered unless he attracts a murderer.  Then be not robbed:  it lies within your own power.  And be not murdered.  Or if you are, you deserve it.  Keep your guard over yourself, now, always and forever.  Yes, against God quite as hard as against the devil.  He’s fully as dangerous to you. . . .

Thus thinking, not in his mind but in his soul, his active, living soul, he gathered his equanimity once more, and accepted the fact.  So he rose and tidied himself for dinner.  His face was now set, and still.  His heart also was still—­and fearless.  Because its sentinel was stationed.  Stationed, stationed for ever.

And Aaron never forgot.  After this, it became essential to him to feel that the sentinel stood guard in his own heart.  He felt a strange unease the moment he was off his guard.  Asleep or awake, in the midst of the deepest passion or the suddenest love, or in the throes of greatest excitement or bewilderment, somewhere, some corner of himself was awake to the fact that the sentinel of the soul must not sleep, no, never, not for one instant.

CHAPTER XVII

HIGH UP OVER THE CATHEDRAL SQUARE

Aaron and Lilly sat in Argyle’s little loggia, high up under the eaves of the small hotel, a sort of long attic-terrace just under the roof, where no one would have suspected it.  It was level with the grey conical roof of the Baptistery.  Here sat Aaron and Lilly in the afternoon, in the last of the lovely autumn sunshine.  Below, the square was already cold in shadow, the pink and white and green Baptistery rose lantern-shaped as from some sea-shore, cool, cold and wan now the sun was gone.  Black figures, innumerable black figures, curious because they were all on end, up on end—­Aaron could not say why he expected them to be horizontal—­little