Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/91

 scheme of vision. These present hours disconcerted him therefore the more that they poured again the elements into the crucible. The violet fumes went up afresh, but were thick and confounding. It was not that he didn't, the figure in the frame, remain extraordinarily persuasive, but that he on the contrary quite harassed credulity. It was not that there was less of him than one wanted, but rather that there was too inordinately much and that there would be more and more of the measure to come. Ralph repeatedly felt, as he let himself go, that it would come in force. He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother or of Son. When he moved away a little it was to let these things start at their ease, and when he next turned upon them it was to assist at the prodigy before it should stop.

It must at the same time be mentioned that he knew at moments the chill of intermissions, that he had more than once to shake himself in the lapse of faith. He saw during these revulsions but what he had seen before, the sharpest mere suggestion, no doubt, in the whole range of the effective art of suggestion. The young man looked away, but not from any embarrassment that he could produce. It wasn't what he hid that he thought of, but what he saw for 77