The world's welfare is his own; its griefs are also his. He errs and makes atonement; he achieves and helps others to achieve; he loathes the cloister and loves the hearth. He suffers when society is stricken; he mourns when the tide of evolution seems to rest from its eternal task 'of pure ablution round earth's human shores'; he is troubled when transitory victories fall to evil or ignorance; in fine, he lives. And his watch-tower and beacon is not content, not peace, but truth. He stands as high above the cowardly serenity of any anchorite or chambered thinker, as the star above glimmering and rotten wood in a forest hidden; and he knows that no great heart is ever passionless, or serene, or emparadised beyond the cry of little hearts, until it has begun to grow cold. To be holy to yourself alone is to be nought; a piece of marble makes a better saint; and he who quits the arena to look on, though he may be as wise as the watching gods, is also as useless. Dimly, out of the cloud of misery that fell upon him when his son perished, Baskerville began to perceive and to feel these facts. He had consoled himself by thinking that the only two beings he loved in the whole world were gone out of it, and now waited together in eternity for his own arrival thither. Their battle was ended; and since they were at rest, nothing further remained for him to trouble about. But the anticipated peace did not appear; no anodyne poured into his soul; and he discovered, that for his nature, the isolated mental standpoint did not exist. There could arise no healing epiphany of mental indifference for him. He might be estranged, but to exile himself was impossible. He must always actively hate what he conceived to be evil; he must always suspect human motives; he must always feel the flow and ebb of the human tide. Though his own rocky heart might be lifted above them, the waves of that sea would tune its substance to throb in sympathy, or fret it to beat with antagonism, so long as it pulsed at all. This discovery surprised the man; for he had believed that a radical neutrality to human affairs belonged to him. He attributed the sustained restlessness of his spirit to recent griefs and supposed that the storm would presently disappear; and meantime he plunged into a minor whirlwind by falling into the bitterest quarrel with his elder brother. Nathan indeed he had suffered to depart in peace; but as soon as the bereaved father learned that Vivian's son, Ned, was engaged to Cora, and perceived how it was this fact that had finally killed hope in Mark and induced the unhappy weakling to destroy himself, his rage burst forth against the master of Cadworthy; and when Vivian called upon the evening of the funeral to condole with Humphrey, an enduring strife sprang up between them.