A question carelessly thought and instantly answered caused him to return to earth sooner than he had intended. The answer to his question had been in the nature of a hard jolt. It had to do with sin. Sin, he learned, is not doing something which other people regard as sinful, but something which you yourself know to be sinful. Lying, theft, arson, murder, bigamy may on occasion be acts of light, charity, and commiseration, no matter how the man-mob may execrate, judge, and punish them. But the same things may be also the worst of crimes. And only the individual who commits them can possibly know. That individual doesn’t even have to know. It is what he thinks that counts; not what he pretends to think, not what he swears in open court that he did think, but what, without self-deception, he actually did and does think. And Derrick learned that if during his brief absence from them any of those earth persons whom he loved so dearly had sinned, committed some act or other which they knew for themselves to be sinful, there would be an opaque veil which neither his eyes nor theirs could pierce, nor the words of their mouths. But he was not _greatly_ worried. As men count time he had been absent from the earth and from his loved ones only for a very short time. They would still be in the depths of mourning for him. And even if they were evilly disposed persons, which they were not, they would hardly have had time to think of anything but their grief and their loss. IV As he left the Place of the wonderful lights and shades and colours and perfumes, he realized that he could not have been perfectly happy in it. He could not have been _perfectly_ happy, because he now perceived that by the mere act of leaving it behind he had become still happier, and that perfect happiness could only be his when he reached “home” and beheld his loved ones. When he had been taken from his home to the hospital the buds on the pear trees had been on the point of bursting. The pear trees would be in full bloom now. When he had been taken away the shutters of the house had been taken from their hinges, painted a pleasant apple green and stood in the old carriage house to dry. They would be back on their hinges now, vying in smartness with the two new coats of white paint which the painters had been spreading over the low rambling house itself. How sweet the house would look among the fresh young greens of spring! Perhaps the peewees who came every year had already begun to build in the veranda eaves.