ammoth sense of self, when it
extends unto the next generations, becomes a keeper of the race.
Ebenezer had been touched, relaxed, disintegrated. Here was an interest
outside himself which was yet no external. Vast, level reaches lay about
that fact, and all long unexplored. But these were peopled. He saw them
peopled....

... As in the cheer and stir within the house where that night were
gathered his townsfolk, his neighbours, his "hands." He had thought that
their way of meeting him, if he chose to go among them, would matter
nothing. Abruptly now he saw that it would matter more than he could
bear. They were in there at Mary's, the rooms full of little families,
getting along as best they could, taking pride in their children,
looking ahead, looking ahead--_and they would not know that he
understood_. He could not have defined offhand what it was that he
understood. But it had, it seemed, something to do with Letty's account
book and Bruce's baby....

Gradually he let himself face what it was that he was wanting to do. And
when he faced that, he left the hobbyhorse where it was under the wall
and went into the street.

He took his place among the externals of the Winter night, himself
unconscious of them. The night, with all its content, a thing of
explicable fellowships, lay waiting patiently for those of its children
who knew its face. In the dark and under the snow the very elements of
earth and life were obscured, as in some clear wash correcting too
strong values. He moved along the village, and now his dominant
consciousness was the same consciousness in which that little village
lived. But he knew it only as the impulse that urged him on toward
Jenny's house. If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished
not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to
come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the
boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the
"hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house--and to something else....

"What else?" he asked himself.

Mechanically he looked up and saw the heavens crowded with bright
watchers. In that high field one star, brighter than the others, hung
over the little town. He found himself trying to see the stars as they
had looked to him years ago, when they and the night had seemed to mean
something else....

"What else?" he asked himself.

The time did not seem momentous. It was only very q