days of our home-coming, but
we set the house in order, we recalled to the lonely rooms the old
associations, and we quietly took up the cares and burdens we had
dropped. It was not easy at first, and there were days when we were
both heartsore; but we waited and worked and hoped. Our neighbours
found us more silent and absorbed than of old, but neither that change
nor our absence seemed to have made any impression upon them. Indeed,
we even doubted if they knew that we had taken such a journey. Day by
day we stepped into the old places and fell into the old habits, until
all the broken threads of our life were reunited and we were apparently
as much a part of the world as if we had never gone out of it and found
a nobler and happier sphere.

But there came to us gradually a clear consciousness that, though we
were in the world, we were not of it, nor ever again could be. It was
no longer our world; its standards, its thoughts, its pleasures, were
not for us. We were not lonely in it; on the contrary, when the first
impression of strangeness wore off, we were happier than we had ever
been in the old days. Our reputation was no longer in the breath of
men; our fortune was no longer at the mercy of rising or falling
markets; our plans and hopes were no longer subject to chance and
change. We had a possession in the Forest of Arden, and we had friends
and dreams there beyond the empire of time and fate. And when we
compared the security of our fortunes with the vicissitudes to which
the estates of our neighbours were exposed; when we compared our
noble-hearted friends with their meaner companionships; when we
compared the peaceful serenity of our hearts with their perplexities
and anxieties, we were filled with inexpressible sympathy. We no
longer pierced them with the arrows of satire and wit because they
accepted lower standards and found pleasure in things essentially
pleasureless; they had not lived in Arden, and why should we berate
them for not possessing that which had never been within their reach?
We saw that upon those whom an inscrutable fate has led through the
paths of Arden a great and noble duty is laid. They are not to be the
scorners and despisers of those whose eyes are holden that they cannot
see, and whose ears are stopped that they cannot hear, the vision and
the melody of things ideal. They are rather to be eyes to the blind
and ears to the deaf. They are to interpret in unshaken trust an