lay. His thoughts went back to the ant. That ant could not understand why Tempest lifted it up, nor why he put it down again. Supposing that he was expecting information on subjects which he was as little capable of understanding? All over this great humming world lives were being born, lives were dying, with every breath he drew. What other equipment could avail man against that reeling knowledge but Faith? Faith that his God held the ends of every tangled skein; faith that when he too was able to understand he should understand; faith that the submissive acceptance of Faith as ultimate was the one way; of growing beyond it. It would not be for Tempest to discover his Great Secret this side the stars, although, by his life, he might help secure the discovery to later generations. As he lay there a strange, peaceful sense of fatherhood towards the future, of sonhood towards the past, came over him. As his progenitors, the Cavemen, had worked through their descendants out of blind animal terrors and ignorance, so the men that should come after Tempest might work to heights now unguessed at by him. Whether he knew or not would not matter. He knew now. He knew that he and all men had their glorious infinitesimal part in the moulding of the future. For the fact that man may not live to himself alone is at once the redemption and the temptation of mankind.
He got up at last and walked back to the barracks. Through long tangled ways he had returned to the truth which a child learns at its mother's knee. But he had won it for himself now, and therefore it was precious as it could never have been before. It might not make life easier, perhaps, because life is not meant to be easy. It might not make him very good, because man is not meant to be very good. He is meant to stay human enough to sympathise with other men. But he had got a solid base at last on which to build his mud-heaps.
Before him the great lake rolled to rightward and the great plains rolled to left. The sun was warm and hazily golden over both, and a faint blue veined the distance. There was the smell of rain and of quickening earth in the air, and a few duck flew over; making no sound, but striking the note of life into the far-spreading peace.
