close to him, pulsing with a rhythm to which the
rhythm of his being answered. He yearned for that strange and exquisite
satisfaction, compounded of mystery and wonder, and thrilling with
something akin to pain, that is called forth in the human being who
feels another human being centring all its highest faculties, its
strongest powers, its deepest hopes in him. He desired intensely, as he
had never desired before, true communion with another, that mingling of
bodies, hearts, and spirits, that is the greatest proof of God to man.

The lights of the Casa del Mare were lost to his eyes in the night.
He looked for them still. He strained his eyes to see them. But the
powerful night would not yield up its prey.

And now, in the darkness and with Hermione's last words ringing in his
ears, he felt almost overwhelmed by the solitariness of his life in the
world of lives.

That day, before he came to the island, he had met himself face to face
like a man meeting his double. He had stripped himself bare. He had
searched himself for the truth. Remembering all the Marchesino had said,
he had demanded of his heart the truth, uncertain whether it would save
or slay him. It had not slain him. When the colloquy was over he was
still upright.

But he had realized as never before the delicate poise of human nature,
set, without wings, on a peak with gulfs about it. Had he not looked in
time, and with clear, steadfast eyes, might he not have fallen?

His affection for Vere was perfectly pure, was the love of a man without
desire for a gracious and charming child. It still was that. He knew it
for that by the wave of disgust that went over him when his imagination,
prompted by the Marchesino's brutality, set pictures before him of
himself in other relations with Vere. The real man in him recoiled
so swiftly, so uncontrollably, that he was reassured as to his
own condition. And yet he found much to condemn, something to be
contemptuous of, something almost to weep over--that desire to establish
a monopoly--that almost sickly regret for his vanished youth, that
bitterness against the community to which all young things instinctively
belong, whatever their differences of intellect, temperament, and
feeling.

Could he have fallen?

Even now he did not absolutely know whether such a decadence might have
been possible to him or not. But that now it would not be possible he
felt that he did know.

Age could never complete youth, and