by the rim of her bonnet. This companionship was the best, all, that
life had to offer. He felt no need to importune her about the future,
their marriage; curiously it seemed as though they had been married, and
were walking in the security, the peace, of a valid and enduring bond.
There was no necessity for talk, laborious explanation, periods
infinitely more empty than this silence. They walked as close to each
other as her skirt would permit; and at times her muff, swinging on a
wrist, would brush softly against him. How strangely different the
actual values of existence were from the emphasized, trite moments and
emotions. In the middle of his life, at the point of his greatest
capability for experience, his most transcendent happiness came from the
present, the deliberate, unquestioning walk with Susan, the aimless
progress through an invisible city and under a masked clear heaven of
stars. No remembered thrill compared with it, reached the same height,
achieved a similar dignity of consummation.

The way became more uneven; low clustered sheds rose out of the darkness
against a deeper black beyond, and they came to the river. The bank was
marshy, but a track of pounded oyster shells, visible against the mud,
led to a wharf extending into the solid, voiceless flow of the water.
Jasper Penny stood with Susan gazing into the blanketing gloom. A wan,
disintegrated radiance shone from a riding light in the rigging of a
vessel, and a passing warm blur flattened over the wet deck as a lantern
was carried forward. No other lights, and no movement, rose from the
river; no sound was audible at their back. The city, from the evidence
of Jasper Penny's sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his
consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or
hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious;
he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a
continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition. He had been swept,
he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking
of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud.
A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told
himself, ever written: "Before he was I am." Its vast implications
easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present
rapture--it was no less--lay beyond his grasp. He lingered over it; gave
it up ... returned to Susan.

"Wonder