habit had at the end of a year or two become the one it would have
cost him most to relinquish. Now they had really, his Dead,
something that was indefensibly theirs; and he liked to think that
they might in cases be the Dead of others, as well as that the Dead
of others might be invoked there under the protection of what he
had done. Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had laid down
appeared to him to act in the spirit of his intention. Each of his
lights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light was
kindled. This was what he had fundamentally agreed for, that there
should always be room for them all. What those who passed or
lingered saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called
suddenly into vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom
it evidently had a fascination, often seated there in a maze or a
doze; but half the satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and
fitful worshipper was that he found the years of his life there,
and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions, the
conquests, if there had been such, a record of that adventurous
journey in which the beginnings and the endings of human relations
are the lettered mile-stones. He had in general little taste for
the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other
places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible
to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something of
that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to an ache
that begins to succumb to treatment. To the treatment of time the
malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him. The
day was written for him there on which he had first become
acquainted with death, and the successive phases of the
acquaintance were marked each with a flame.