"And what has it got to do with Ormond?" asked Rulledge, but with less
impatience than usual.

"Why, nothing, I'm afraid, that I can make out very clearly. And yet
there is an obscure connection with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a
vision. Mrs. Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, perhaps
because even at the last moment he was not definite himself. What she was
clear about, was the fact that his mood, though it became more serious,
by no means became sadder. It became a sort of solemn joy instead of the
light gaiety it had begun by being. She was no sort of scientific
observer, and yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely
observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him psychologically.
Sometimes the light in his room would wake her at night, and she would go
to him, and find him lying with a book faced down on his breast, as if he
had been reading, and his fingers interlaced under his head, and a kind
of radiant peace in his face. The poor thing said that when she would ask
him what the matter was, he would say, 'Nothing; just happiness,' and
when she would ask him if he did not think he ought to do something, he
would laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But it did not go
off; the unnatural buoyancy continued after he became perfectly tranquil.
'I don't know,' he would say. 'I seem to have got to the end of my
troubles. I haven't a care in the world, Jenny. I don't believe you could
get a rise out of me if you said the nastiest thing you could think of.
It sounds like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I have found
out the reason of things, though I don't know what it is. Maybe I've only
found out that there _is_ a reason of things. That would be enough,
wouldn't it?'"