tired, and he always drove now; the action of his heart was weak
and gave him none of the reassurance conferred by the action of his
fancy. None the less he returned yet again, returned several
times, and finally, during six months, haunted the place with a
renewal of frequency and a strain of impatience. In winter the
church was unwarmed and exposure to cold forbidden him, but the
glow of his shrine was an influence in which he could almost bask.
He sat and wondered to what he had reduced his absent associate and
what she now did with the hours of her absence. There were other
churches, there were other altars, there were other candles; in one
way or another her piety would still operate; he couldn't
absolutely have deprived her of her rites. So he argued, but
without contentment; for he well enough knew there was no other
such rare semblance of the mountain of light she had once mentioned
to him as the satisfaction of her need. As this semblance again
gradually grew great to him and his pious practice more regular, he
found a sharper and sharper pang in the imagination of her
darkness; for never so much as in these weeks had his rites been
real, never had his gathered company seemed so to respond and even
to invite. He lost himself in the large lustre, which was more and
more what he had from the first wished it to be--as dazzling as the
vision of heaven in the mind of a child. He wandered in the fields
of light; he passed, among the tall tapers, from tier to tier, from
fire to fire, from name to name, from the white intensity of one
clear emblem, of one saved soul, to another. It was in the quiet
sense of having saved his souls that his deep strange instinct
rejoiced. This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a
contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could
save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk from dying to,
for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human