He found himself a prey to a certain mental incoherence, a bewildering
activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious,
monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing
happened to him--the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly
receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain
whether the ship of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and
sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the
ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising,
would float her off into blue water and she would sail hopefully once
again.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other
happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship of
his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school.
Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street,
Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain,
it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not
as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of
women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young
loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and
Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his
near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion
and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never
having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for
purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He
was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether
beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would
have it, with intimate and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried