He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own received him not: so, while the struggling world rested, unconscious, in infinite calm of right, He came close to her with human eyes that had loved, and not been loved, and had suffered with that pain. And, trusting Him, she only said, "Show me my work! Thou that takest away the pain of the world, have mercy upon me!" CHAPTER VII. For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,--finally, he thought. Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother's the day she died. How the stern old woman met death half-way! why should she fear? she was as strong as he. Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just reward. It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul. It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,--a life of growth, labour, achievement,--eternal. "Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,"--favourite words with him. He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke them; because, I think, it was like his own,--a Titan strength of endurance, an infinite capability of love, and hate, and suffering, and over all, (the peculiar identity of the man,) a cold, speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all time. "Ohne Hast." Going slowly through the night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of purpose,--each life complete in itself: why not his own, then? The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not see it. Knowles--that old sceptic--believed in it, and called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was it he said? "Der Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst und erhalt er nicht, dich, mich, sich selbst?" There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over them, like half-comprehended music,--as simple and tender as if they had come from the depths of a woman's heart: it touched him deeper than his power of control. Pah! it was a dream of Faust's; he, too, had his Margaret; he fell, through that love. He went on slowly to the mill. If the name or the words woke a subtile remorse or longing, he buried them under restful composure. Whether they should ever rise like angry ghosts of what might have been, to taunt the man, only the future could tell.