felt a mischievous elation that all this secret pageant, this
retrospective wonder that was life, should be his to watch and enjoy,
while all around thought him past emotion already.

If, then, men lived by death, what was death? Not a mere cessation--then
a going-on.... He made no definite images of it in his mind, did not
even wonder whether he should see those others he had known and loved
who had passed into these tracts before him. That seemed to him now, as
it always had when he had thought of it, rather unimportant. What
mattered, he had always known, was the adjustment of the soul to
something beyond it, to which it and the whole of life stood in
inextricably close and vital relationship. Those other relationships,
those other meetings, might be included in that as an added pleasure,
but the other thing, if there at all, would necessarily be of such
supreme importance as in its bright light to drown all minor effulgence.
And that it was there, always, in this world and the next, he knew, for
he had always felt his soul breathe it as surely as his lungs had
inhaled the free airs of the earth. That the first meeting with it might
not be all happiness, that as, in the Parson's creed, inevitable pains
would have to be worked through before the soul could be sufficiently
purged to meet it clearly upon its ultimate levels, mattered very
little. At least, the pains would be different pains, not the same old
wearying ones of earth--the disappointments and the mortifications, the
burning anxieties and the bitter losses, the overwhelming physical
disasters, that everyone had to go through sooner or later.

It lay before him, not as a darkness, but a brightness, that he knew. He
felt an exquisite easing, even of the very muscles of his stricken
body, as he thought of it--a brightness which every soul went to swell,
which gained a glowing, luminous pulse of light from each one that
slipped into its shining spaces....

And with that came light on all that puzzled and tormented him since he
had known the facts about Nicky, and the mere physical paternity of him
seemed a small thing beside such light as this. That passion of joy he
had felt when he had heard of Nicky's coming had not been wasted: it had
gone to make something in himself he would never otherwise have known;
it had gone on in him as a living force, and had helped him to make
Nicky what he was as much as one human being can make another. Archelaus
had "won" i