udith,
the renascence of intimacy with Boase and the growth of his children,
growing away from him every year, but none the less to be loved for
that. What had he lived by during those years? Not, consciously, by
anything, except a mere going on and a determination to make the best
of things, to get the most out of everything. When the Parson died he
had a glimpse of a world he had lost sight of since his youth, but not
then could he give up this one sufficiently to do more than glimpse it.
And when Nicky was in South Africa he had suffered that second violent
onslaught of the personal which racked him this way and that.
Vassie--the horror that her death had held now seemed to him as empty of
all save peace as Hilaria's. But all the while he had been living by
what he found in that passionate moment when he stood, a man of sixty,
at the top of the hill above the seaward valley and had seen the rainbow
arching over Cloom and the distant sea. Beauty, the actual joy of the
world, that had been feeding his soul all the time, giving him those
moments of ecstasy without which Killigrew had always said the soul
could not be saved alive. From that moment the slope of the ten years
down to the present seemed so swift that he found his vision of them
less clear than of preceding periods. What of these last years, each of
which was bringing him with, it seemed, such increasing momentum,
towards the end?

And in a flash he saw what he had, all unknowingly, lived by since the
decline of his powers had fallen upon swiftness, and he saw it as what
alone makes life bearable. He had lived by the knowledge of death, by
the blessed certainty that life could not go on for ever, that there
must be an end to all the wanderings and pain, to all the dulnesses and
unsatisfactory driftings, to all the joys that would otherwise fall upon
sluggishness or cloy themselves. This it was that gave its fine edge to
pleasure, its sweet sharpness to happiness, and their possible solace to
pain and grief. He had lived, as all men do, knowingly or not, by death.
This was the secret bread that all men shared.

Again came that period of unconsciousness which corresponded to night,
and the third day dawned. Again his brain felt of a crystal clearness;
he was undistressed by the fact he could not speak to those around him
or even return the pressure of their hands, for he was feeling all the
old intoxicating joy of discovery at breaking into new lands. He even