ey reached the
Campagna, and through the ghostly light the ghostly flowers and grasses
shimmered for a while and faded out. It was hot traveling after sunset;
but when the lights of Rome broke in a sudden blaze and the train
reached the station it was cool upon the platform. Michael let a porter
carry his luggage to a hotel close at hand. Then he walked quickly down
the Esquiline Hill. He wandered on past the restaurants and the barber
shops, caring for nothing but the sensation of walking down a wide
street in Rome.

"There has been nothing like this," he said, "since I walked down the
High. There will be nothing like this ever again."

Suddenly in a deserted square he was looking over a parapet at groups of
ruined columns, and immediately afterward he was gazing up at one mighty
column jet black against the starshine. He saw that it was figured with
innumerable horses and warriors.

"We must seek for truth in the past," he said.

How this great column affected him with the secrets of the past! It was
only by that made so much mightier than the bars of his cot in
Carlington Road, which had once seemed to hold passions, intrigues,
rumors, ambitions, and revenges. All that he had once dimly perceived as
shadowed forth by them was here set forth absolutely. What was this
column called? He looked round vaguely for an indication of the name.
What did the name matter? There would be time to find a name in the
morning. There would be time in the morning to begin again the conduct
of his life. The old world held the secret; and he would accept this
solitary and perdurable column as the symbol of that secret.

"All that I have done and experienced so far," Michael thought, "would
not scratch this stone. I have been concerned for the happiness of other
people without gratitude for the privilege of service. I have been given
knowledge and I fancied I was given disillusion. If now I offer myself
to God very humbly, I give myself to the service of man. Man for man
standing in his own might is a blind and arrogant leader. The reason why
the modern world is so critical of the fruits of Christianity after
nineteen hundred years is because they have expected it from the
beginning to be a social panacea. God has only offered to the individual
the chance to perfect himself, but the individual is much more anxious
about his neighbor. How in a moment our little herds are destroyed,
whether in ships on the sea or in towns by earthquake