* * * * *

Something of this is but a hint of what Frank experienced; it came and went, no doubt, in gusts, yet all through he seems to have felt that sense that here was a door into that great watching world beyond—­that here, in what is supposed by the world to be the narrow constraint of religion, was a liberty and an outlook into realities such as the open road and nature can but seldom give.  But for my part, I can no more follow him further than I can write down the passion of the lover and the ecstasy of the musician.  If these things could be said in words, they would have been said long ago.  But at least it was along this path of perception that Frank went—­a path that but continued the way along which he had come with such sure swiftness ever since the moment he had taken his sorrows and changed them from bitter to sweet.  Some sentences that he has written mean nothing to me at all....

Only this I see clearly, both from my talks with Father Hildebrand and from the diary which Frank amplified at his bidding—­that Frank had reached the end of a second stage in his journey, and that a third was to begin.

It is significant also, I think, in view of what is to follow, that the last initiation of this stage should have taken place on such an occasion as this.

CHAPTER V

(I)

There are certain moods into which minds, very much tired or very much concentrated, occasionally fall, in which the most trifling things take on them an appearance of great significance.  A man in great anxiety, for example, will regard as omens or warnings such things as the ringing of a bell or the flight of a bird.  I have heard this process deliberately defended by people who should know better.  I have heard it said that those moods of intense concentration are, as a matter of fact states of soul in which the intuitive or mystical faculties work with great facility, and that at such times connections and correlations are perceived which at other times pass unnoticed.  The events of the world then are, by such people, regarded as forming links in a chain of purpose—­events even which are obviously to the practical man merely the effects of chance and accident.  It is utterly impossible, says the practical man, that the ringing of a bell, or the grouping of tea-leaves, or the particular moment at which a picture falls from a wall, can be anything but fortuitous:  and it is the sign of a weak and superstitious mind to regard them as anything else.  There can be no purpose or sequence except in matters where we can perceive purpose or sequence.

Of course the practical man must be right; we imply that he is right, since we call him practical, and I have to deplore, therefore, the fact that Frank on several occasions fell into a superstitious way of looking at things.  The proof is only too plain from his own diary—­not that he interprets the little events which he records, but that he takes such extreme pains to write them down—­events, too, that are, to all sensibly-minded people, almost glaringly unimportant and insignificant.