CHAPTER VII.
For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he thought.
Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother's the day she died.

How the stern old woman met death half-way! why should she fear?
she was as strong as he.

Wherein had she failed of duty?
her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just reward.
It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul.
It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of growth, labour, achievement,--eternal.
"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,"-- favourite words with him.

He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,--a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love, and hate, and suffering, and over all, (the peculiar identity of the man,) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time.
"Ohne Hast." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,--each life complete in itself: why not his own, then?
The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed.

If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it.