d him to
preserve the mere naked strip of existence that he no longer valued. He
hated himself for going, yet he went that he might hate himself the more
bitterly with each step of the journey.

The lamp on his desk flared up fitfully and as he turned to lower the
wick his eyes fell on Connie's picture. The uplifted babyish face came
back to him as he had first seen it under floating cherry-colored
ribbons, and his anger of the last half-hour melted and vanished utterly
away. For the sake of those few months, when the waning fire within him
had leaped despairingly toward the flame of life, he knew that he could
never quite put Connie from his heart--for the sake of his short
romance and for the sake, too, of his child that had lived three hours.
The thin, heavily veined hand on the arm of his chair quivered for an
instant, and he felt his pulses throb quickly as if from acute physical
pain. From the pitiable failure of his marriage, from his loneliness and
disillusionment there came back to him the three hours when he had
looked upon the face of his living child--the hours of his profoundest
emotion, his completest reconciliation. He had never regarded himself as
an emotionally religious man, yet ten years ago, on the night that his
boy died, he had felt that an immortal and indissoluble part of himself
had gone out into the void. For the first time he had come to the deeper
reality of life--through the flowing of the agonised longing within
himself toward that permanent universal consciousness of which all human
longings are but detached and wandering forms. From that time death had
held for him a more personal promise; and the obligation to live, to
fulfil one's present opportunities, had become charged with another
meaning than he had been used to read into what he called his mere
animal responsibility. The boy who had died was for him in a close, an
intimate relation, still vitally alive; and with one of those quaint yet
pathetic blendings of memory with imagination the little undeveloped
soul had blossomed, not invisibly, incommunicably, but into actual daily
companionship with his thoughts.

Sitting there under the green lamp, he himself showed as an
insignificant figure to possess an ear for the divine silences, an eye
for the invisible beauty. His long, gaunt body lay relaxed and inert
upon the leather cushions, and his knotted, bony hands--the hands of a
scholar and a thinker--were stretched, palms downward, o