"If that is to be, if that is essential," he said, "I give it the same welcome as I have ever given to joy. It may frighten me out of existence, because the body is a poor sort of thing, and an ounce of lead or less will kill it, or, what is worse, deprive it of sight or hearing. But whatever can happen cannot hurt me, this me. Do you tell me that a rifle bullet, or a hangman's noose can kill me? And can a frightful revelation of all the sorrow of the world, and its pain, and its terror, and its preying, the one creature on another, touch my belief that life is triumphant, and that joy is triumphant over pain? Oh, I can believe most things, but not that. Should that come, I daresay my stupid flesh would shrink, shrink till it died if you like. But me? How does it touch me?" He looked round with a sudden startled air, even as the words were on his lips. "Tramp, tramp," he said, "there is a skipping and jumping in the bushes. I saw a frightful big goat on the ridge to-day, and it followed me, butting and sparring. I could almost think it had got into the garden. There is a sort of goaty smell, too. Well, it can't reach me in the hammock. Ah, there is lightning again: there is going to be a storm to-night." "Sleep indoors," said Philip quietly. He was quiet, for fear of his nerves. But Tom laughed. "I should rather say to you 'Sleep outside,'" he said. "If the lightning makes another shot here, it will certainly shoot at the highest thing, and the house is much higher than my hammock." He looked at him a moment in silence, with the pity that is akin not to contempt, but to love. "Ah, you are afraid of fear," he said. "That is one degree worse than anything we need be afraid of. It is of our own making, too. We dress up Fear like a turnip-ghost and then scream with terror at it. Or, don't you remember as a child making faces at yourself in a looking-glass till you were so frightened you could scarcely move? That is what most of us do all our lives." Again, and rather more vividly, a blink of lightning was reflected in the clouds, and from far off the thunder muttered sleepily. "So when I go," asked Philip, "I can think of you as being as happy and fearless--as certain of yourself and the scheme of the world as ever?" Merivale smiled. "Yes, assuredly you can do that," he said, "and though I do not like to hear you talk of going, of course I know you must. If you stopped here you would get bored and fidgetty. You have not at present because you have been getting well, and in convalescence all conditions, so long as one is allowed to stop still, are delightful. But your place, your work is not here. I feel that as strongly as you. You have the harder part; you have to go back and sort the grains of gold from the great lumps of worthless alloy, and distinguish many things that glitter from the royal metal. However, you know all that as well as I do." He leaned forward over the table, and looked very earnestly at Philip.