this way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one
or another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And
was it only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused
through his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether
there had not been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid
the solitude he had which in spite of ardent friendship perhaps loved
best of all things--some other companion, an unfailing companion,
ever at his side throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by
the way, patient of his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above
all with his grateful recognition, onward from his earliest days, of
the fact that he was there at all? Must not the whole world around
have faded away for him altogether, had he been left for one moment
really alone in it? In his deepest apparent solitude there had been
rich entertainment. It was as if there were not one only, but two
wayfarers, side by side, visible there across the plain, as he
indulged his fancy. A bird came and sang among the wattled hedge-
roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the child who kept it was
gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still conspiring, he
passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself, beside him in
his coming and [68] going, to those divinations of a living and
companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had become
aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings--in Plato and
others, last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one reflection upon
another, he passed from such instinctive divinations, to the thoughts
which give them logical consistency, formulating at last, as the
necessary exponent of our own and the world's life, that reasonable
Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator, which for
the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the New
Testament the Father of Men--even as one builds up from act and word
and expression of the friend actually visible at one's side, an ideal