"You are ill," he says, bending solicitously over her, and laying aside in that compassionate moment the armour of his coldness. She does not answer for awhile; then, drawing a long breath, and trying to smile: "The church was so close," she says, sighingly; "and that smell of escaped gas always makes me feel faint, and--and" (with a shudder)--"that dreadful man--with his metaphors all taken from the charnelhouse!" "I wish he were there himself, with all my heart," answers Gerard, devoutly; "he might there frame metaphors to his taste at his leisure." "And it is so terrible to think that it is all _true_, isn't it?" she says, fixing her great awestruck eyes upon, his face, as if trying to find comfort and reassurance there; "that the reality exceeds even his revolting word-painting; that we _shall_ be _loathsome_, all of us!--you and I and everybody--young and old, beautiful and ugly! How _could_ God be so cruel as to let us know it beforehand?" "Knowing it beforehand is better than knowing it at the time, which, at least, we are spared," replies St. John, composedly. "But are we?" she cries, eagerly: "that is the question! Latterly I have been beset by a fearful idea that death is but a long catalepsy. In a catalepsy, you know, a person seems utterly without consciousness or volition; breath is suspended, and all the vital functions; and yet he feels and sees and hears more acutely than when in strong health. Why may not death, too, be a catalepsy?" "Absurd!" he says. "My poor child, it is thoughts like these, gone wild, that fill madhouses. According to your theory, at what point of time does your catalepsy end? When we are dissolved into minutest particles of dust does each atom still feel and suffer?" "My theory, as you call it, will not hold water, I know," she answers gravely, "but it does not haunt me any the less. There are times when one cannot reason--one can only _fear_." "You should not give way to these morbid fancies," he says, chidingly; "they are making you ill." "Am I ill, do you think? Do I look ill?" she asks, with startled eagerness. The havoc worked in face and figure by the last few months is too directly under his eyes for him to answer anything but truthfully. "Very ill." "You don't think I'm going to _die?_" she says, lowering her voice, and laying her hand on his arm, while her great feverish eyes burn into his very soul. "People are not any the more likely to die for being thin and weak, are they? Creaky doors hang the longest." "Die!--God forbid!" he replies, trying to speak lightly. "Let us banish death from our talk. I suppose it is this place of tombs that has made him take such a leading part in it. Come, you are not at all fit to go back into church, and I am not anxious to hear the tail-end of that wormy discourse. The smell of brimstone is quite strong enough in my nostrils already. Let us go home!"