breath, a small dancing hope in his laughter. "_Or,
Glenfernie, shall we dream on?_"

But the other opened his eyes upon things like the Kelpie's Pool and
the old room in the keep where a figure like himself read letters that
lied. He saw in many places a figure like himself, injured and fooled,
stuck full of poisoned arrows. The figure grew as he watched it, until
it overloomed him, until he was passionately its partisan. He said no
word, but he flung the smoking torch yet held in hand among the ruins,
and, leaving Ian and his black and silver, plunged down the slope to
the old, old street along which now poured a wave of carnival.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The laird of Glenfernie lay in the flowering grass, beneath a
pine-tree, rising lonely from the Roman Campagna. The grass flowed for
miles, a multitudinous green speculating upon other colors, here and
there clearly donning a gold, an amethyst, a blue. The pine-tree
looked afar to other pine-trees. Each seemed solitary. Yet all had the
oneness of the great stage, and if it could comprehend the stage might
swim with its little solitariness into a wider uniqueness. In the
distance lay Rome. He could see St. Peter's dome. But around streamed
the ocean of grass and the ocean of air. Lifted from the one, bathed
in the other, strewed afar, appeared the wreckage of an older Rome.
There was no moving in Rome or its Campagna without moving among
time-cleansed bones and vestiges. Rome and its Campagna were like
Sargasso Seas and held the hulks of what had been great galleons. The
air swam above endless grass, endless minute flowers. In long
perspective traveled the arches of an Aqueduct.

He lay in the shadow of a broken tomb. It was midspring. The bland
stillness of this world was grateful to him, after long inner storm.
He lay motionless, not far from the skirts of Contemplation.

The long line of the Aqueduct, arch after arch, succession fixed,
sequence which the gaze made unitary, toled on his thought. He was
regarding span after span of imagery held together, a very wide and
deep landscape of numerous sequences, more planes than one. He was
seeing, around the cells, the shadowy force lines of the organ, around
the organ the luminous mist of the organism. He passed calmly from one
great landscape to another.

Rome. To-day and yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow. The
"to-morrow" put in the life, guaranteeing an endless present, endless
breathing. He saw Rome