The lake took on a darker shade, and daylight began to fade from the upper blue.
It was only perhaps a moment--one of those moments for which time has no measurement--that the soul of this man had gone out of him, as it were, into the vastness of the sunset; and when he recalled it his situation took on for him a somewhat different aspect.

He experienced something of that temporary relief from personal responsibility that moments of religious sentiment often give to minds that are unaccustomed to religion.

He had been free for the time to disport himself in something infinitely larger and wider than his little world, and he took up his duty at the point at which he had left it with something of this sense of freedom lingering with him.
He was a good man--that is, a man whose face would have made it clear to any true observer that he habitually did the right in contradistinction to the wrong.

He was, moreover, religious, and would not have been likely to fall into any delusion of mere sentiment in the region of religious emotion.

But that which deludes a man commonly comes through a safe channel.