It came always at moments like this, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, eight centuries before.

. . . Far called, our navies melt away,

On dune and headland sinks the fire.

Lo! All our pomp of yesterday,

Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre . . .

As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest uncle’s ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Arcturus.

. . . For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust, that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .

And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the innermost recesses of his heart.

. . . For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles, he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind’s eye; and he felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great, hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution. He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever, but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him back.

Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned toward home.

As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft of his cane.

“Be welcome to this house,” said his father and straightened up. “You’d better get out of that uniform and into some man’s clothes. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

MAN