there were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort and failure, sin and despair.  The life that was in all of them, was it partly of God and partly of themselves?  He laughed again at the question.  The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act.  The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God.  That devil, too, that he saw standing close by and whispering to them—­his form was dim and fading; he was not sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but—­if he had life, was it his own?  Somewhere, he could not remember where or when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, “Thou couldst have no power against me except it were given thee from above.”

The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has not manifold meanings.  Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart saw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be a queen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment and age; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before, the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effort to do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too, a nature that was beneath this outer range of activity, a small trembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light.  In some strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from one group to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength was increasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made up almost the entire personality of the woman.  This change did not take place visibly in the other people among whom she stood.  It was in Ann he saw the change.  He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to think of nothing else for a long time.

He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, and it seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divine life by which all things were, and by which they changed, growing by transformation into a glory which was still indistinct to him, too far off to be seen in any way except that its light came as the light comes from stars which we say we see and have never really seen at all.

Through this joy and light the details of life began to show again.  The two forces which he had always supposed had moulded his life acted his early scenes over again.  His young mother, before the shadow of despair had come over her, was seen waiting upon all his boyish footsteps with cheerful love and patience, trying to guide and to help, but trying much more to comfort and to please; and his father, with a strong body and the strength of fixed opinion and formed