had hung between him and a final vision of
the truth; and as his convictions weakened he had replaced them with an
immense pity, an all-sufficing hope. Sentimental verbiage: he saw it
clearly now. He had been the dupe of the old word-jugglery which was
forever confounding fact and fancy in men's minds. For it was
essentially an age of words: the world was drunk with them, as it had
once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the
two. He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter
slowly through his faculties. The sources of energy were so benumbed in
him that he felt like a man whom long disease had reduced to
helplessness and who must laboriously begin his bodily education again.
Hate was the only passion which survived, and that was but a deaf
intransitive emotion coiled in his nature's depths.

Sickness at last brought its obliteration. He sank into gulfs of
weakness and oblivion, and when the rise of the tide floated him back to
life, it was to a life as faint and colourless as infancy. Colourless
too were the boundaries on which he looked out: the narrow enclosure of
white walls, opening on a slit of pale spring landscape. His hands lay
before him, white and helpless on the white coverlet of his bed. He
raised his eyes and saw de Crucis at his side. Then he began to
remember. There had been preceding intervals of consciousness, and in
one of them, in answer perhaps to some vaguely-uttered wish for light
and air, he had been carried out of the palace and the city to the
Benedictine monastery on its wooded knoll beyond the Piana. Then the
veil had dropped again, and his spirit had wandered in a dim place of
shades. There was a faint sweetness in coming back at last to familiar
sights and sounds. They no longer hurt like pressure on an aching nerve:
they seemed rather, now, the touch of a reassuring hand.

As the contact with life became closer and more sustained he began to
watch himself curiously, wondering what instincts and habits of thought
would survive his long mental death. It was with a bitter, almost
pitiable disappointment that he found the old man growing again in him.
Life, with a mocking hand, brought him the cast-off vesture of his past,
and he felt himself gradually compressed again into the old passions and
prejudices. Yet he wore them with a difference--they were a cramping
garment rather than a living sheath. He had brought back from his lonely
voyagings a