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.