great spaces emphasised his own existence just then as petty,
crabbed, and sordid. The discords within him were so harsh that he
could not respond to the sweet mystery of the night, or to the music
that called from sea and sky, from the shadows and the spaces.

Again that bitter sense of his whole life became concentred in one
moment. And then, as the sound of the soft-flowing tide came up to him
again, it seemed to bring with it words that echoed strangely through
his being. And his being seized upon them and gripped them. The voice
of Mary Kettering seemed to be commanding him, as if her hostile
spirit were hovering near, and he could hear her vulgar laugh
disgracing the solitudes.

"There's the water. Now drown yourself!"

The consciousness of his personal unimportance to the world was
accentuated against the free vastness on which he gazed. The mission
that alone had had power to stir his blood, of being a voice to the
spell of which all men should yield, had been decreed against. His
hope of winning the right to live amid and breathe an atmosphere in
harmony with his being, an atmosphere in which his individuality, as
he conceived it, should ripen and expand and yield all the fragrance
that was in it, was utterly dead.

He could not detach his dead hope from his life; its rotting carcass
weighed it down and poisoned it. The love, too, that Margaret had
inspired in him but remained as an exquisite bitterness. And as for
those who loved him, better they should bear the blow at once than
that he should torture them constantly. Let them mourn for him now;
let them, in the years that were to come, sometimes feel his presence
with them and think of him as one who had had good in him, but whose
life had proved piteously futile. For them much pain now and an
occasional pang in the future; for him, the sweetness of unending
rest, for was there not sweetness in death?

He looked again out to sea, striving to pierce the darkness that
floated over the world like a spirit, and divining the far-off line
where the sky touched the water.

One last, glorious swim to reach it! And out there, in the
infinitudes, amid the silence and the loneness, with all the still
music of the universe lulling him to sleep, should his being gently
merge into the all-pervasive essence; there, in the large freedom of
the airs, under the full spread of Heaven's stars, and in the soft
embrace of the velvet waters, should he feel his blood beat to