minds.  For it was essentially an age of words:  the world was drunk with them, as it had once been drunk with action; and the former was the deadlier drug of the two.  He looked about him languidly, letting the facts of life filter slowly through his faculties.  The sources of energy were so benumbed in him that he felt like a man whom long disease had reduced to helplessness and who must laboriously begin his bodily education again.  Hate was the only passion which survived, and that was but a deaf intransitive emotion coiled in his nature’s depths.

Sickness at last brought its obliteration.  He sank into gulfs of weakness and oblivion, and when the rise of the tide floated him back to life, it was to a life as faint and colourless as infancy.  Colourless too were the boundaries on which he looked out:  the narrow enclosure of white walls, opening on a slit of pale spring landscape.  His hands lay before him, white and helpless on the white coverlet of his bed.  He raised his eyes and saw de Crucis at his side.  Then he began to remember.  There had been preceding intervals of consciousness, and in one of them, in answer perhaps to some vaguely-uttered wish for light and air, he had been carried out of the palace and the city to the Benedictine monastery on its wooded knoll beyond the Piana.  Then the veil had dropped again, and his spirit had wandered in a dim place of shades.  There was a faint sweetness in coming back at last to familiar sights and sounds.  They no longer hurt like pressure on an aching nerve:  they seemed rather, now, the touch of a reassuring hand.

As the contact with life became closer and more sustained he began to watch himself curiously, wondering what instincts and habits of thought would survive his long mental death.  It was with a bitter, almost pitiable disappointment that he found the old man growing again in him.  Life, with a mocking hand, brought him the cast-off vesture of his past, and he felt himself gradually compressed again into the old passions and prejudices.  Yet he wore them with a difference—­they were a cramping garment rather than a living sheath.  He had brought back from his lonely voyagings a sense of estrangement deeper than any surface-affinity with things.

As his physical strength returned, and he was able to leave his room and walk through the long corridors to the outer air, he felt the old spell which the life of Monte Cassino had cast on him.  The quiet garden, with its clumps of box and lavender between paths converging to the statue of Saint Benedict; the cloisters paved with the monks’ nameless graves; the traces of devotional painting left here and there on the weather-beaten walls, like fragments of prayer in a world-worn mind:  these formed a circle of tranquillising influences in which he could gradually reacquire the habit of living.