o memories? He brooded over what these
memories might be--must be; he tried to taste and handle that other's
faults in time and space. But he could not plunge into Alexander's
depths of wrath. As he could not, he made himself contemptuous of all
that--of Old Steadfast's power of reaction!

A star shot across the moon-filled night, so large a meteor that it
made light even against that silver. A mass within Ian made a slow
turn, with effort, with thrilling, changed its inclination. He saw
that disdain, that it was shallow and streaked with ebony. He moved
with a kind of groan. "Was there--is there--wickedness?... What, O
God, is wickedness?"

He pressed the rock with his hand--sat up. The old taskmaster,
alarmed, gathered his forces. "I say that it is just that--pride,
vengefulness, hard misunderstanding!"

A voice within him answered. "Even so, is it not still yourself?"

He stared after the meteor track. There was a conception here that he
had not dreamed of.

It seemed best to keep still upon the rock. He sat in inner wonder.
There was a sense of purity, of a fresh coolness not physical, of
awe. He was in presence of something comprehensive, immortal.

"Is it myself? Then let it pour out and make of naught the old poison
of myself!"

The perception could not hold. It flagged and sank, echoing down into
the caves. He sat still and felt the old taskmaster stir. But this
time he found strength to resist. There resulted, not the divine
novelty and largeness of that one moment, but a kind of dim and bare
desert waste of wide extent. And as it ate up all width, so it seemed
timeless. Across this, like a person, unheralded, came and went two
lines from "Richard III"

Clarence is come--false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury.

It went and left awareness of the desert.
"False--fleeting--perjured...."

He saw himself as in mirrors.

The desert ached and became a place of thorns and briers and
bewilderment. Then rose, like Antaeus, the taskmaster. "_And what of
all that--if I like life so?_"

Sense of the villa and the roses and the nightingales in the
coverts--sense of wide, mobile sweeps and flowing currents inwashing,
indrawing, pleasure-crafts great and small--desire and desire for
desire--lust for sweetness, lust for salt--the rose to be plucked, the
grapes to be eaten--and all for self, all for Ian....

He started up from the rock above Como, and turned to des