“I don’t fancy that many of us will live to see that,” he replied. “Most of us will be drowned in the next tide. It will come in a wall of water many thousand feet high. Don’t you notice a feeling of lightness in your body? The attraction of this great stranger is beginning to drag at us. On the other side of the Earth men are feeling an intolerable heaviness. And our speed increases. We have been drawn out of our orbit. We are rushing now to greet the stranger with a kiss of fire. Our circling about the sun is done for ever. We and the stranger are leaping together like two bubbles in a cup.” I believe some hours passed before I spoke again. A sense of imminence had grown upon me in the meantime. I was aware of the guards that were fetching me to execution. “After all,” I cried, “there may still be such a thing as an immortal soul. Though every physical expression is smashed at one blow, that does not prove....” “There is no such thing as proof possible,” my companion interrupted. “But don’t you know in your heart that it’s no good?” * * * * * “No good. It’s no good.” I woke with a start at the repetition of that statement. My young modeller was rolling a great ball of plasticine, and before I could stop him he had thrown it with deadly accuracy at his effigy of man. “He wouldn’t come right,” he explained, picked up the shapeless mass of clay, and tossed it carelessly into a corner of the workshop. “Oh, but you shouldn’t have done that,” I said, with the incurable didacticism of the pedagogue. THE MIRACLE “_I’m_ dead.” She heard the voice, _his_ voice, speaking distinctly, with something of the same fatalism, half-careless, half-resentful, that he had used when he returned to France after their five short days of married life. For one moment she believed that it was actually his voice, that he had come suddenly and wonderfully out of his six weeks’ insensibility, to a doubting interrogation of the darkness. But even as she fumbled impatiently for the switch of the electric light, she knew that the voice had not come from the bed on the further side of the room, but had spoken its horrible message close, very close, to her ear--intimately, confidentially, with a touch of swaggering, careless courage. And as the light, with an effect of servile obedience, disclosed the room at her touch of the switch, she had no least hope that she would be the witness of the longed-for miracle; that she would see him who had lain so long a lax and useless counterfeit of his vigorous self, half raised and questioning the unfamiliar surroundings with his pitiful assertion. Nevertheless she got out of bed, a slight pathetic figure in the white light that searched out every corner of the room, and crossed to where he lay inert and flaccid.