BOOK III.
THE LAMP OF KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER I.
Adjustments.
The next two years passed very quickly for Mauney, with few perceptible changes. The war was over. Merlton, one day, had gone crazy with armistice celebration, only to settle down on the next to its usual life. The university was crowded now with returned soldiers. It was a familiar scene to behold the great square dotted with limping students still in uniform. The sight of them brought sharp emotions to Mauney—mingled sympathy for their sufferings and regret that he had been denied a share in their adventures in France. He knew that he, himself, had been peculiarly untouched by the war. Nevertheless, the stupendous event had made an impression upon him, the more severe by reason of his own non-participation in it. A sensitive depth in his nature was perpetually harrowed by thought of it. Having, by this time, followed the records of history from their dim beginnings up to the present, he was confronted, as was every one, by an impassable barrier, which refused to yield to any philosophic explanation. Perhaps he was too near the catastrophe, in time, to gain the needed perspective. But the facts were constantly before him. Something had slipped in the great, good purpose of God. In the substrata of life a tremendous fault had occurred, bearing its outward upheavals of death, suffering and disorder.
Three years at college had made a great difference in Mauney Bard. He had passed through the academic terms, like the unnoticed steps of a great staircase, without noticing that he was, in a sense, always climbing. He was climbing nearer to something—something perceived to be intangible, but worthy.
From his humble beginnings on Lantern Marsh farm, where his perspective was hedged by blind walls of pettiness on every side, he had emerged into a grateful breadth of vision, where, at his very feet, lay the treasures of accumulated knowledge and whence, too, the horizon was attractive with mystery.