After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles thought the man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day, cold and grave, as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were enough for him.
Did he understand the iron fate laid on him?
Where was the strength of the self-existent soul now?
Did he know that it was a balked, defeated life, that waited for him, vacant of the triumphs he had planned?
"The self-existent soul! stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent deity,--the chance burning of a mill!" Knowles muttered to himself, looking at Holmes.

With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether there might not, after all, be a Something,--some deep of calm, of eternal order, where he and Holmes, these coarse chances, these wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian, even that namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be unconsciously working out their part.

Looking out of the hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue, impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the maddest raging of the petty world.

There was such calm! such infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him, it held the world,--all Wrong, all Right! For an instant the turbid heart of the man cowered, awestruck, as yours or mine has done when some swift touch of music or human love gave us a cleaving glimpse of the great I AM.

The next, he opened the newspaper in his hand.