f the wrong she had done him to consist
in his having still before him years and years to groan under it. She
had sacrificed a parent, the pearl of parents, no older than herself:
it wouldn't so much have mattered if he had been of common parental
age. That he wasn't, that he was just her extraordinary equal and
contemporary, this was what added to her act the long train of its
effect. Light broke for him at last, indeed, quite as a consequence
of the fear of breathing a chill upon this luxuriance of her spiritual
garden. As at a turn of his labyrinth he saw his issue, which opened
out so wide, for the minute, that he held his breath with wonder. He was
afterwards to recall how, just then, the autumn night seemed to clear to
a view in which the whole place, everything round him, the wide terrace
where he stood, the others, with their steps, below, the gardens, the
park, the lake, the circling woods, lay there as under some strange
midnight sun. It all met him during these instants as a vast expanse of
discovery, a world that looked, so lighted, extraordinarily new, and in
which familiar objects had taken on a distinctness that, as if it had
been a loud, a spoken pretension to beauty, interest, importance, to
he scarce knew what, gave them an inordinate quantity of character and,
verily, an inordinate size. This hallucination, or whatever he might
have called it, was brief, but it lasted long enough to leave him
gasping. The gasp of admiration had by this time, however, lost itself
in an intensity that quickly followed--the way the wonder of it, since
wonder was in question, truly had been the strange DELAY of his vision.
He had these several days groped and groped for an object that lay at
his feet and as to which his blindness came from his stupidly looking
beyond. It had sat all the while at his hearth-stone, whence it now
gazed up in his face.

Once he had recognised it there everything became coherent. The sharp
point to which all his light converged was that the whole call of his
future to him, as a father, would be in his so managing that Maggie
would less and less appear to herself to have forsaken him. And it not
only wouldn't be decently humane, decently possible, not to make
this relief easy to her--the idea shone upon him, more than that, as
exciting, inspiring, uplifting. It fell in so beautifully with what
might be otherwise possible; it stood there absolutely confronted with
the material way in which it mi