But the mind was active long afterwards. Again and again he seemed to himself standing in a bright light, alive and free. Innumerable illusions played about him. In one of the most persistent he was climbing the slope of a Swiss meadow in May. Oh! the scent of the narcissus, heavy still with the morning dew--the brush of the wet grass against his ankles--those yellow anemones shining there beneath the pines--the roar of the river in the gorge below--and beyond, far above, the grey peak, sharp and tall against that unmatched brilliance of the blue. In another he was riding alone in a gorge aflame with rhododendrons, and far down in the plain--the burnt-up Indian plain--some great fortified town, grave on its hill-top, broke the level lines--"A rose-red city, half as old as time." Or, again, it was the sea in some glow of sunset, the white reflections of the sails slipping down and down through the translucent pinks and blues, till the eye lost itself in the infinity of shades and tints, which the breeze--oh, the freshness of it!--was painting each moment anew at its caprice--painting and blotting, over and over again, as the water swung under the ship. But all through these freaks of memory some strange thing seemed to have happened to him. He carried something in his arms--on his breast. The anguish of his inner pity for Letty, piercing through all else, expressed itself so. But sometimes, as the brain grew momentarily clearer, he would wonder, almost in his old cynical way, at his own pity. She seemed to have come to love him. But was it not altogether for her good that his flawed, contradictory life should be cut violently from hers? Could their marriage, ill-planted, ill-grown, have come in the end to any tolerable fruit? His mind passed back, with bitterness, over the nine months of it; not bitterness towards her--he seemed to be talking to her all the time, as she lay hidden on his shoulder--bitterness towards himself, towards the futility of his own life and efforts and desires. But why his more than any other? The futility, the insignificance of all that man desires, all that waits on him--that old self-scorn, which began with the race, tormented him none the less, in dying, for the myriads it had haunted so before. An image of human fate, which had struck him in some book, recurred to him now--an image of daisied grass, alive one moment in the evening light--a quivering world of blades and dew, insects and petals, a forest of innumerable lines, crossed by the innumerable movements of living things--the next withdrawn into the night, all silenced, all effaced.