He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander
through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who
was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self;
and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a
third presence--not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose
eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and
whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus in
short he settled to live--feeding all on the sense that he once HAD
lived, and dependent on it not alone for a support but for an
identity.
It sufficed him in its way for months and the year elapsed; it
would doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident,
superficially slight, which moved him, quite in another direction,
with a force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India.
It was a thing of the merest chance--the turn, as he afterwards
felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to live to believe that if
light hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still
have come in another.
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