Meanwhile there was time to be passed, and he did not care to leave this spot, though its present desolation tore at his very vitals, with memories of incalculable promise, and of unconsummated delight. As, awakening from his dream of satisfied love long ago, during that strange former existence, in the summer noon under the light, sibilant shelter of the lime grove, so now he hungered for completeness of possession, for the crowning of desire. Yet he kept himself in hand, even as he had kept the young, brown, thorough-bred horse in hand, when, finding the level, would have broken its pace and run riot more than once on the road up from the station. He moved away and sat down on the defaced and ragged sill of the bay-window. The moon had risen, but its mild light was often obscured by softly-moving floats of thin, opalescent vapour. These crossed its face in apparently endless procession, herded up from southward and the narrow Channel sea. Laurence watched them, at first almost unconsciously, his mind occupied with other, and, to himself, more immediate and vital interests. But at length their slow and stately progress began to work upon his imagination, and insinuate itself into the very substance and foundation of his thought. He began to see in them a procession of the souls of all those generations of men and women, whose efforts and emotions, power of intellect, fiercely pursued ambitions, passionate devotions, passionate revolts, had gone to generate his own constitution, mental and physical, and determine his ultimate fate. And so he came to regard them with a sustained and deepening attention, since their aspect seemed pregnant with suggestion of admonition, of encouragement, of warning, or restraint. Once again he decided to keep vigil in this house, to watch with the unnumbered and unrecorded dead whose offspring and inheritor he was. Not until all of them should have passed by, and the moon ride solitary in the heavens, would he go across the valley--himself now somewhat bitterly solitary--and visit Agnes Rivers's grave.