ears
measureless to man, and reflected with a thrill that after all man might
have his part in every one of them. Yes, that bird of passage as he
seemed to be, flying out of darkness into darkness, still he might have
spread his wings in the light of other suns millions upon millions of
years ago, and might still spread them, grown radiant and glorious,
millions upon millions of years hence in a time unborn.

If only I could know the truth. Was Life (according to Bickley) merely
a short activity bounded by nothingness before and behind; or (according
to Bastin) a conventional golden-harped and haloed immortality, a word
of which he did not in the least understand the meaning?

Or was it something quite different from either of these, something vast
and splendid beyond the reach of vision, something God-sent, beginning
and ending in the Eternal Absolute and at last partaking of His
attributes and nature and from aeon to aeon shot through with His light?
And how was the truth to be learned? I asked my Eastern friends, and
they talked vaguely of long ascetic preparation, of years upon years of
learning, from whom I could not quite discover. I was sure it could not
be from them, because clearly they did not know; they only passed on
what they had heard elsewhere, when or how they either could not or
would not explain. So at length I gave it up, having satisfied myself
that all this was but an effort of Oriental imagination called into life
by the sweet influences of the Eastern stars.

I gave it up and went away, thinking that I should forget. But I did
not forget. I was quick with a new hope, or at any rate with a new
aspiration, and that secret child of holy desire grew and grew within
my soul, till at length it flashed upon me that this soul of mine was
itself the hidden Master from which I must learn my lesson. No wonder
that those Eastern friends could not give his name, seeing that whatever
they really knew, as distinguished from what they had heard, and it was
little enough, each of them had learned from the teaching of his own
soul.

Thus, then, I too became a dreamer with only one longing, the longing
for wisdom, for that spirit touch which should open my eyes and enable
me to see.

Yet now it happened strangely enough that when I seemed within myself
to have little further interest in the things of the world, and least
of all in women, I, who had taken another guest to dwell with me,
those things of the worl