About an hour before noon
Now the bench was not in his mind when he started from the monastery ; neither had he thought of it on the way , or of the dark history it had helped him to ; in a freak , he took the seat he had formerly occupied , placed his arm along the coping of the parapet , and closed his eyes . And strange to say , the conversation of that day repeated itself almost word for word . Stranger still , it had now a significancy not then observed ; and as he listened , he interpreted , and the fever of spirit left him . About an hour before noon , he arose from the bench like one refreshed by sleep , cool , thoughtful , capable . In the interval he had put off boyishness , and taken on manhood replete with a faculty for worldly thinking that would have alarmed Father Hilarion . In other words , he was seeing things as they were ; that bad and good , for instance , were coexistent , one as much a part of the plan of creation as the other ; that religion could only regulate and reform ; that the end of days would find good men striving with bad men -- in brief , that Demedes was performing the role to which his nature and aptitude assigned him , just as the venerable Hegumen , his father , was feebly essaying a counterpart . Nor was that all .