en harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling
back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than
his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt
the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head
went round; he was going; he had gone.

CHAPTER III

What had next brought him back, clearly--though after how long?--was Mrs.
Muldoon's voice, coming to him from quite near, from so near that he
seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him while he
lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but half-raised
and upheld--conscious, yes, of tenderness of support and, more
particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly
refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at
his service; then another face intervened, bending more directly over
him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample
and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself
on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person
remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were cold,
these marble squares of his youth; but _he_ somehow was not, in this rich
return of consciousness--the most wonderful hour, little by little, that
he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally
passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him
for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the
place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had
come back, yes--come back from further away than any man but himself had
ever travelled; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come
back _to_ seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey
had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness
grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself; he had been
miraculously _carried_ back--lifted and carefully borne as from where he
had been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage.
Even with this he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to
knowledge was the break in the long mild motion.

It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge--yes, this was the beauty
of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has
gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, aft