Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/81

 echo of his own whisper on the dead silences, his eyes fixed in a frightened despair—for it seemed to him, now, in his newly critical view of his faith, that he had been believing in another Santa Claus.

  are the commonplaces of young experience, the growing pains of any spiritual development; but they came on Don with a sudden violence that gave them a staggering weight. He was away from home: that is to say, he was away from the comfortable outlook on life which a man gets from the very permanence of familiar surroundings; he was facing the powers of life and death, alone and in the open; he was the more conscious of his own weakness, more exposed to the assault of doubt, and perhaps more inclined to be contemptuous of the fireside religions. He had been raised in those sheltered beliefs which are, in a way, feminine and sentimental; he had been, for the past few months, thrown upon his own unmothered masculinity in a world that despised the gentle moralities which it preached on one day in seven; and his mind had changed more than he had been aware.

When he woke next morning, it was to a dull acceptance of that loss which had come upon him, the previous night, in such a frantic revolt against bereavement. He looked out his window on the first 