It was a long time after Mr. Clibran-Bell had gone before Francis went upstairs again. The candle burnt itself out. His thoughts see-sawed up and down. "Frederic--dead. Frederic--dead." When he had groped his way back to his own existence, burdened with this new catastrophe, he said to himself: "I can't go on. . . . I can't go on." He saw Frederic lying huddled in the corner of a railway carriage, strangers to whom he was nothing finding him. . . . Then he thought of that other dead body that he had seen long, long ago, the woman lying in the little dark house, under the guttering light of the tallow candle and the clement light of the moon. Death violent, death insistent, death that would not be shrouded away or softened or made seeming blessed with words or tears. Tears! Death was too harsh. And yet it mattered nothing how it came about. It was always the same: bitter, the bitter end to bitterness. All life was salt with the savour of death. Vain, vain the endeavour to sweeten it. Sweetness and corruption, were they not yoke-fellows? . . . Words from the Bible passed through Francis Folyat's mind: "I am the resurrection and the Life," and again: "For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck," and again in his bitter grief he turned to the Book of Job: "My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart. "They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness. "If I wait, the grave is mine house; I have made my bed in the darkness. "I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister. "And where is now my hope? As for my hope, who shall see it? "They shall go down to the base of the pit where our rest together is in the dust." XXXIII THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER _The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine Mine has a snub nose like to mine._ THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL. TWELVE middle-class Englishmen and an official sat in inquest on the body of Frederic. They gazed shyly and uninterestedly upon it and then heard the evidence to the effect that he was most happily married and was without financial worry of any kind. . . . The verdict, in view of the fact that the revolver was in the deceased's overcoat pocket, was one of death by misadventure.