In after life he always looked back to it as
something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too
beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though
at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger
said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of
his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as
though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only
faint and exquisite portions.
But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and
when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the
morning, Harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively,
meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and
went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words
with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they
left the confines of the forest--
"And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the
brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important
it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with
the keenest possible restraint.
Pages:
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80