He sat at peace beside his lamp. The interval had brought changes
to his towns-people. As he had walked home this afternoon, he had
paused and looked across at some windows of the second story of a
familiar corner. The green shutters, tightly closed, were gray
with cobweb and with dust. One sagged from a loosened hinge and
flapped in the rising autumn wind, showing inside a window sash
also dust-covered and with a newspaper crammed through a broken
pane. Where did Ravenel Morris live now? Did he live at all?
Accustomed as he was to look through the distances of human
history, to traverse the areas of its religions and see how its
great conflicting faiths have each claimed the unique name of
revelation for itself, he could not anywhere discover what to him
was clear proof either of the separate existence of the soul or of
its immortal life hereafter. The security of that belief was
denied him. He had wished for it, had tried to make it his. But
while it never became a conviction, it remained a force. Under all
that reason could affirm or could deny, there dwelt unaccountable
confidence that the light of human life, leaping from headland to
headland,--the long transmitted radiance of thought,--was not to go
out with the inevitable physical extinction of the species on this
planet. Somewhere in the universe he expected to meet his own, all
whom he had loved, and to see this friend. Meantime, he accepted
the fact of death in the world with that uncomplaining submission
to nature which is in the strength and sanity of genius.
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