I’m quite wrong and that he can’t really be a child of light:  we should in this case either have seen him collapse or have discovered what inwardly sustains him.  We are ourselves inwardly collapsing—­there’s no doubt of that:  in spite of the central fires, as Lorraine says somebody in Boston used to say somebody said, from which we’re fed.  From what central fires is Temple nourished?  I give it up; for, on the point, again and again, of desperately stopping him in the street to ask him, I recoil as often in terror.  He may be only plotting to make me do it—­so that he may give me away in his paper!

“Remember, he’s a mere little frisking prize ass; stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything:  it’s all you now know and all you need to know, and you’ll be as firm on it as on a rock!” This is what I said to poor Peg, on the subject of Harry Goward, before I started, in the glorious impulse of the moment, five nights ago, for New York; and, with no moment now to spare, yet wishing not to lose my small silver clue, I just put it here for one of the white pebbles, or whatever they were, that Hop o’ my Thumb, carried off to the forest, dropped, as he went, to know his way back.  I was carried off the other evening in a whirlwind, which has not even yet quite gone down, though I am now at home and recovering my breath; and it will interest me vividly, when I have more freedom of mind, to live over again these strange, these wild successions.  But a few rude notes, and only of the first few hours of my adventure, must for the present suffice.  The mot, of the whole thing, as Lorraine calls it, was that at last, in a flash, we recognized what we had so long been wondering about—­what supreme advantage we’ve been, all this latter time in particular, “holding out” for.

Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous; we were “saving up,” she said—­and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we’ve also kept hold of some of them—­for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign.  We should just meet it rounding a corner as with the rush of an automobile—­a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate.  That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg’s coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously “engaged.”  I didn’t believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else.  Her turning up in such a fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant’s announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.