yet it seemed to
him he went with a more anxious heart than that with which he had set
out. Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already,
whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him
that no one could ever take his place. Killigrew he was missing as much
now as when he died, because though he had not seen him so very often,
yet Killigrew and he had each stood for something to the other that no
one else could quite supply, and so his going had left a sense of loss
that time did nothing to fill. But with Boase it was more than that.
There was something in Ishmael which Boase had fathered and which knew
and recognised its spiritual paternity. His mind had taken much colour
from Killigrew, but from Boase it had taken form. He felt that that
afternoon in the stuffy study he had touched something he had almost
forgotten, that had slipped rather out of his life for the past years,
since Nicky had been growing up: a significance, a sense of some plan of
which he had caught glimpses in his youth and had since forgotten.

As he went through the wet world it seemed to him as though he were
once again the same Ishmael who had so often gone this way long years
ago, when the soul behind life had still intrigued him more than the
manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the
study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the
remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty
books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a
forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life
but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere material
agencies of the sense of smell and sight: or whether the Parson had
touched him in some atrophied cord that had rung more freely in days
gone by, the effect was the same.

As he went it was as though time had ceased to exist, as though he
caught some vision of the whole pattern as one rhythmic weaving, and not
isolated bits disconnected with each other. The sensation mounted to his
brain and told him that time itself was a mere fashion of thought, that
he was walking in some period he could not place. He remembered the day
when the Neck had been cried, and it had seemed to him that the moment
was so acute it could never leave off being the present and slip into
the past; he remembered the first day at St. Renny when he was staring
at the sunbeam and feeling