what is it for? What are you doing it all for? What is the secret? What is the meaning? And why can't we know it to help us?"
All that was good and pure and fine in him reached out for the answer, stopping his breath. Far-off worlds seemed to creak and groan as they swung their ordered way. Far off that secret lay, brooding calm interpretation over chaos. Tempest had come so far many times with the knowledge that the secret was not for the dwellers on the earth. Now, halting just one instant with the wind and the flesh of those worlds in his face, he saw further before he dropped back to earth. He straightened in his chair, closing his hand slowly on the table.
"Before God it is for us," he said. "Because it is formed by us and works through us. Without us the meaning and the secret and the solution couldn't be. It needs us as we need it. We belong to each other, and we can't make the whole until we find it. And yet we eternally lock it out from our understandings."
His eyes were wide, unseeing; the eyes of the dreamer who dreams realities; of the man who looks into his soul. The intensity of that inner search whitened his face, drawing it into lines. At last he stood up. The finite will would hold him in those rarer heights no longer. But he had taken one step further. By whatever mysterious ways the secret of Life is hid from man; by whatever mysterious ways he may stumble to it at last, it is there to be found. Because it is not God who has hidden it, but man himself.
A moment longer he waited, as though to gird up his loins.
"Great Power," he said, "we've got to find that secret; to justify ourselves—and You."
In the passage the yoke of routine fell on him again. He took the lamp and went swiftly up the narrow stairs to give Dick a forgotten order. The bunk-room was empty, but he halted a moment, sweeping the light round it. He had not been there since Dick came, and the man's personality rose at him from every corner. On Dick's bare bunk, with its neat sausage of rolled clothes at the head, lay his fur coat and cap, his half-cleaned rifle, and
