"The Pan-pipes, too," he said--"they are never silent now: I hear them all the time, and I take that to mean that I am at last never unconscious of the hymn of life. I heard them at first, you know, just in snatches and broken stanzas, when I could screw myself up to the realisation of the song without end and without words that goes up from the earth day and night. Where does it come from? As I told Evelyn, I neither know nor care. Perhaps my brain conceives it, and sends the message to my ears, but it is really simpler to suppose that I hear it, just as you hear my voice talking to you now. For there is no question as to the fact of its existence; the hymn of praise does go on forever. So, perhaps, in my small way, I am complete, so to speak, with regard to that. Then--then there is another thing that may be behind the curtain. It may be that I shall be shown, and if I am shown this, it must be right and necessary--all the sorrow and pain and death that is in the world. I have turned my back on it; I have said it was not for me. But perhaps it will have to be for me. And that--to use a convenient phrase--will be to see Pan." He paused on the word, then shook his hair back from his forehead, and got up. "And now I have told you all," he said. Philip got up, too, feeling somehow as if he had been mesmerised. He could remember all that Merivale had said; it was strangely vivid, but it had a dreamlike vividness about it; the fabric, the texture, the colour of it, for all its vividness, was unreal somehow, unearthly. But as to the reality of it and the truth of it, no question entered his head. He had never heard anything, no commonplace story or chronicle of indubitable events which was less fantastic. He looked out in silence a moment over the garden, and though half an hour ago he had been vaguely frightened at the thought of the mysterious and occult powers that keep watch over the world, yet now when they had been spoken of with such frankness, so that they seemed doubly as real as they had before, he was frightened no longer. It was, indeed, as Merivale had said; he had been afraid of fear. It was already very late, and after a few trivial words he went indoors to go up to bed. As he got to the bottom of the stairs he looked back once, and saw his friend standing still on the verandah, with his face towards him. And as Philip turned, Merivale, standing under the lamp in his white shirt and flannels, with collar unfastened at the neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbow, smiled and nodded to him. "Good night!" he said; "sleep well. I think you are learning how to do that again." * * * * *