For two hours or more he mourned and thought of old times, gazing in a kind of strange wonder at the silent carpet of grass. The shrewd weatherworn face, the twinkling eager eyes, the nasal drawl which so glibly offered up petitions to heaven, all came back to him with a singular vividness. He was surprised to find how actual and clear his friend's personality was to him. It almost frightened him. He glanced round him once or twice uneasily. Cerdic seemed so real and near, an unseen partner in the silence. When one has heard bells tolling for a long time, and suddenly they stop, the brain is still conscious of the regular lin-lan-lone. While this psychic influence eddied round him, and the kindly old face, ploughed deep with toil and sorrow, was still a veritable possession of his brain, there was a certain comfort. As it began to fade, as day from the sky, his loneliness came upon him like death. The real agony of his loss began, and it tortured him until he could feel no more. Pain is its own anodyne in the end. The cordage of his brave heart was so racked and strained by all he had endured that its capacity for sensation was over. So he mourned Cerdic dead no longer, his heart was dead. But we know nothing of this poor brother, if not that in him was a sound piece of manhood, hardened, tempered, and strong. His soul was sweet and healthy, his rough-built body proud of blood and powerful. He must go on and fear nothing. Once more he must rise from his fall and try fortune with a stout sad heart, proving his own Godhead and the glory of his will, over which Fate could have no lordship. In this only, as the poet sang, are men akin to gods, and in all life there is no glory like the "glory of going on." Then did Hyla, the invincible, rise from the ground to breast circumstance--_per varios casus_--to seek his Latium once more. He fell to eating cold roast fish. When he set out again, he had to make a long detour. The sounding pole still remained to him, and he probed every step as he slowly skirted the treacherous green. It was characteristic of him that as he left the fatal spot where the dead Cerdic lay deep down in the mud he never looked round or gazed sadly at the place. He had no thought of sentimental leave-taking, no little poetic luxury of grief moved him. It were an action for a slighter brain than this. It began to be late afternoon, as Hyla made a slow and difficult progress. He had got round the swamp, and pushed on over the fen. Sometimes he waded through stagnant pools fringed with rushes and covered with brilliant copper-coloured water plants. Once, pushing his pole before him, he swam over a wide black pond in which the sun was mirrored all blood red. Often he broke his way through forests of reeds which spiked up far above his head. Everywhere before him the creatures of the fen ran trembling.