Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/303

 up to the house; Alice had disappeared to her room. He went up to his room and to bed almost immediately but he did not sleep. He was not accustomed to be alone with sleeplessness but to-night he lay alone in the silence looking up at the stars above his window and to-night, in his sensation, the stars drew him on and on into their infinite space above, into the reaches of Eternity which he had assumed to say made him tired, of which he would have no more, which could lay no obligations upon him. Eternity! He would not live for it; he would live for pleasure with Fidelia.

He turned from the stars and gazed down at the river flowing on and on ceaselessly, silently, forever. He shut his eyes to it but still he saw the stream, and, more, he seemed to feel the flow of it; he felt himself carried off in the course of that current which became no mere earthly river but the ever-rolling stream of Time bearing all the sons of creation, one after another, away.

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away."

He felt himself struggling in the stream of Time washing him on into that endless Eternity which made him tired, which he would not have but instead of which he would have his wife.

A psalm set to beating in his brain:

"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all Generations.

"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting thou art God."