had been wondrous for others
while he was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the
cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put
it, into his own presence. That had quickened his steps and checked his
delay. If his visit was prompt it was because he had been separated so
long from the part of himself that alone he now valued.

It's accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with a certain
elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. The creature
beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the
place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression. It met him in
mildness--not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of
conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have
closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the
connexion. The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers
affected him so as belonging to him that he resembled for the hour a
contented landlord reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had
happened--well, had happened. He had not come back this time with the
vanity of that question, his former worrying "What, _what_?" now
practically so spent. Yet he would none the less never again so cut
himself off from the spot; he would come back to it every month, for if
he did nothing else by its aid he at least held up his head. It thus
grew for him, in the oddest way, a positive resource; he carried out his
idea of periodical returns, which took their place at last among the most
inveterate of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was
that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the
few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was as
if, being nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even for himself, he
were just everything here, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed
for any witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register
that he could scan like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his
friend, and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his
life, there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander through
the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the
most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander,
which was more extraordinary yet, round