God rest his soul! And never found out, no never. Fine judge on Nepenthe. Always fine judge here. He know everything, and he know nothing. Understand? All nice people here. That so, gentlemens." He told the tale with Satanic gusto, rocking himself to and fro as though convulsed with some secret joy. Then, after expectorating violently, he resumed the oars which had been dropped in the heat of gesticulation. The bishop was pensive. There was something wrong with this story--something fundamentally wrong. He turned to Keith: "That man must be a liar too. If, as he says, the thing was never found out, how can he have learnt all about it?" "Hush, my dear fellow. He thinks I don't know, but I do. It was his own father to whom the adventure occurred." "The adventure?" said Mr. Heard. "The adventure. Surely you are not going to make a tragedy of it? If you cannot see the joke of that story, you must be hard to please. I nearly died of laughing when I first heard it." "What would you have done?" "If I had been the botanist? I would not have made myself disagreeable to the natives. Also, I would not have got myself into a tangle with that rope." "You think he ought to have cut it?" "What else could the poor fellow do? It strikes me, Heard, you attach some inordinate importance to human life." "It's all rather complex," sighed the bishop. "Now that is really interesting!" "Interesting?" "Why should you find it complex, when I find it simple? Let me see. Our lives are perfectly insignificant, aren't they? We know it for a fact. But we don't like it. We don't like being of no account. We want some thing to make us feel more valuable than we are. Consequently we invent a fiction to explain away that insignificance--the fiction of a personality overhead everlastingly occupied in watching every single one of us, and keenly engrossed in our welfare. If this were the case, we would cease to be insignificant, and we might try to oblige him by not killing each other. It happens to be a fiction. Get rid of the fiction, and your feeling of complexity evaporates. I perceive you are in an introspective mood. Worrying about some pastoral epistle?" "Worry about my values, as you would say. Up to the present, Keith, I don't seem to have had time to think; I had to act; there was always something urgent to be taken in hand. Now that I am really lazy for the first time, and in this stimulating environment, certain problems of life keep cropping up. Minor problems, of course; for it is a consolation to know that the foundations of good conduct are immutable. Our sense of right and wrong is firmly implanted in us. The laws of morality, difficult as they often are to understand, have been written down for our guidance in letters that never change."