turn away and
yet powerless to penetrate the darkness of death; fixing with his eyes
her inscribed name and date, beating his forehead against the fact of the
secret they kept, drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some sense
would in pity of him rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones,
however, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and if the face of the
tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair
of eyes that didn't know him. He gave them a last long look, but no
palest light broke.

CHAPTER VI

He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of Asia,
spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity;
but what was present to him everywhere was that for a man who had known
what _he_ had known the world was vulgar and vain. The state of mind in
which he had lived for so many years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a
light that coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the
East was garish cheap and thin. The terrible truth was that he had
lost--with everything else--a distinction as well the things he saw
couldn't help being common when he had become common to look at them. He
was simply now one of them himself--he was in the dust, without a peg for
the sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of
gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of
association to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb. That
had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one
witness of a past glory. It was all that was left to him for proof or
pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought
of it. Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow of his
return. He was drawn there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet
with a confidence, almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many
months that had elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into his
change of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as might
be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert. He had
settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to
himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little old men he
remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizened as they might
look, it was related that they had in their time fought twenty duels or
been loved by ten princesses. They indeed