Graham hesitated. He clasped his hands about his knees, while he sat gazing out of the window. The rain had ceased and a pale sun was beginning to peep out between the heavy clouds. For some moments he did not answer his father. The familiarity of everything about him was borne into his mind. How often he and his father had sat just as they were sitting now!――in this same room! It seemed to him that his life had been moving in a circle, and that he was beginning to return on a path he already knew. For a little the wings of some great spirit had drooped softly about his head.... ‘Too like the lightning....’ His eyes filled and he bent down to hide his face. ‘What is the matter?’ Mr. Iddesleigh asked, but still without getting any reply. ‘Tell me, Graham, are you thinking about Harold?’ ‘Do you wonder I never speak of him?’ ‘Is it too near?... But your silence makes you brood over it all the more.’ ‘I cannot help thinking of him,’ Graham whispered. ‘He gave me his life.’ He rose from his stool, and walking to the window pressed his forehead against the cold glass. The rain was still dripping from the trees, and there was a damp smell in the air; but the sky was clearing, and the sun was growing stronger and stronger. Presently, and without further word, the boy left the room. XII For a while he lingered near the house, restlessly, forlornly, but by and by he went down to the rocks, where he stood looking out over the sea. Piled up on the horizon, like a vast range of purple-black hills, heavy masses of cloud drifted, scarce perceptibly, from east to west of the pale slate-blue sky; and where these rugged heaps were broken the heavens sank away in limitless wells of pure pale light, each edged with a border of bright grass-green. All the light of the day seemed gathered there――like a reflection from a world beyond――and Graham, as he stood at gaze before it, began to wonder if he should ever come any nearer to it than he was just there and then. In the _Phaedo_ he had found many arguments for the immortality of the soul, but more lately he had realised, in his own life, the only one perhaps that actually counted――and this no argument at all; but merely a very simple human desire, a desire to look again upon the face of his friend, the face of him who was buried in the grave. He stooped down and leaned over the slowly-heaving water, watching it rise and sink back, and rise again and sink――over the dark, cold water that seemed nearly black against the rocks――lower still, and lower, till his hair almost brushed the surface. ‘O water whispering Still through the dark into mine ears,―― As with mine eyes, is it not now with his?―― Mine eyes that add to thy cold spring, Wan water, wandering water weltering, This hidden tide of tears.’