He had turned him from his presumptuous attempt to be Providence to his Nelly.

The General never had been, never could be, passive.

He was made for the activities of life.

Yet his religious ideal was passivity--to be in the hands of God expecting, accepting, His Will for all things.

It was an ideal he had never attained to, and it was, perhaps, therefore the dearer.
He was oblivious of the cold, of the creeping water, of the thickening flakes in the air which nearly blotted out the silent ship the other side of the basin.