There then, were all these trappings and borrowings and mind-absorptions upon the surface of his soul, grimacing at the world and hiding what lay behind from the world’s onslaught. But the world had already shot its shaft and made a piercing with its seed. It might stay out now--shooed off effectually by all these grimaces--and laugh. For it was destined to laugh last. It had done its part. Quincy’s soul, in its too late seclusion, would unassisted perform the rest. It could only guard--it could not undo--the future. So the boy went blandly on, with his ideals and his sublimations,--nurturing, the while, the fruit of his past intercourse with life. XI There were sublime moments in that period--moments that were sparks for later fires and that abided with him until the end. Professor Deering had said to him: “The atheist is a man in whom a sense is lacking.” Armed with this, Quincy went forth into the night to be alone with it. He sought a terrain that he already knew. The road crawled out of the town at a low incline. And then, abrupt from it, rose a path over a hill that was clad thick in summer. Now, it lay naked above the squatting road--a vast blue grey, a round of briar stalks and matted underbrush that sang with his racing feet. Upon the summit was a rock that Quincy loved. From one approach it was sheer and rugged. Beyond, a cleft in it, deepened with soil, curved gently down to a copse of elder bushes. From its sheer corner rose an oak tree. Several new tufts sprang from its foot. Above twined ivy and at the top a blaze of quartz, set in the granite, made a seat so that the hill’s declivity rolled away from the eyes to a distant murmurous valley. Here, flashing in sun or moonlight, one caught the river--agleam through its thick marge of summer, or swift and sleek without hindrance for the eye when the gaunt trees of winter basketed its flow. Upon the rock, now, Quincy sat and shivered a bit and looked up at the frozen stars and the steely pool of heaven and asked to sense God.