It was odd to regard life from this standpoint—­to look back upon the days and their incidents that were past, forward upon the days and incidents to come.  Again it was possible for Frank to look upon these things as an outsider and a deliberate critic—­as he had done in the stuffy room of the lodging-house in the town.  Yet now, though he was again an outsider, though he was again out of the whirl of actual living, he seemed to be looking at things—­staring out, as he was, almost unseeingly at the grass slopes before him—­from exactly the opposite side.  Then, they had seemed to him the only realities, these tangible physical things, and all else illusion:  now it was the physical things that were illusive, and something else that was real.  Once again the two elements of life lay detached—­matter and spirit; but it was as obviously now spirit that was the reality as it had been matter a day or two before.  It was obviously absurd to regard these outward things on which he looked as anything but a frame of something completely different.  They were too silent, too still, too little self-sufficient to be complete in themselves.  Something solid lay embraced within them....

So, then, he stared and ruminated, scarcely perceiving that he thought, so intensely conscious was he of that of which he thought.  It was not that he understood anything of that on which he looked; he was but aware that there was something to be understood.  And the trees hung rigid above him, and the clear blue sky still a hard stone beyond them, not yet flushed with dawn; and the grass lay before him, contracted, it seemed, with cold, and every blade soaked in wet; and the silence was profound....

Then a cock crew, a mile away, a thin, brazen cry; a rabbit sat up, then crouched and bolted, and the spell faded like a mist.

Frank turned and walked back under the trees, to see if the Major was awake.

CHAPTER V

(I)

We are arrived now at one of those few deplorable incidents in Frank’s career, against which there is no defense.  And the painful thing about it is that Frank never seemed to think that it required any defense.  He shows no penitence for it in his diary:  and yet moralists are united in telling us that we must never do evil that good may come.  It is only, paralleled by his rash action in leaving Cambridge in defiance of all advice and good sense; so far, that is to say, as a legally permissible act, however foolish, can be paralleled by one of actual crime.  Moralists, probably, would tell us, in fact, that the first led inevitably to the second.

It fell out in this way.