one by one, an abiding-place. And again, the resultant sense of
companionship, of a person beside him, evoked the faculty of
conscience--of conscience, as of old and when he had been at his
best, in the form, not of fear, nor of self-reproach even, but of a
certain lively gratitude.

Himself--his sensations and ideas--never fell again precisely into
focus as on that day, yet he was the richer by its experience. But
for once only to have come under the power of that peculiar mood, to
have felt the train of reflections which belong to it really forcible
and conclusive, to have been led by them to a conclusion, to have
apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal
gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the
shadows of the world, left this one particular hour a marked point in
life never to be forgotten. It gave him a definitely ascertained
measure of his moral or intellectual need, of the demand his soul
must make upon the powers, whatsoever they might be, which [72] had
brought him, as he was, into the world at all. And again, would he
be faithful to himself, to his own habits of mind, his leading
suppositions, if he did but remain just there? Must not all that
remained of life be but a search for the equivalent of that Ideal,
among so-called actual things--a gathering together of every trace or
token of it, which his actual experience might present?



PART THE FOURTH


CHAPTER XX: TWO CURIOUS HOUSES