"Do you not see--I have--sometimes _known_, not 'guessed' nor 'believed,' but _known_ that death was a wonderful, happy thing--a fulfilment, a satisfaction to him who dies--but I have been educated backward into a life where people cannot seem to help regarding it as a sad thing. And----" "Yes?--Yes?" breathed the eager woman. "Tell me--tell me----" But he had come suddenly to a full stop. As if appalled to find only empty words, or no words at all, for some astounding knowledge he would communicate to her, he stammered painfully; then, as if he saw himself caught in guilt, colored furiously. Evelyn Strang could see the inevitable limitations of his world training creep slowly over him like cement hardening around the searching roots of his mind. She marveled. She remembered Strang's pet phrase, "the plaster of Paris of so-called 'normal thinking.'" Then the youth's helpless appeal came to her: "Do you not think that I am doing wrong to speak of these things?" Berber asked, with dignity. The mistress of Heartholm was silent. Recklessly she put by all Doctor Mach's prophecies. She could not stop here; her whole soul demanded that she go further. There were old intuitions--the belief that she and Strang had shared together, that, under rationalized schemes of thought, knowledge of inestimable hope was being hidden from the world. Here was this boy of the infinite vision, of the "_backward educated_" mind, ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe. Could she strike him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the open grave and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips! Suddenly, as if in answer to her struggle, Berber spoke. She was aware that he looked at her curiously with a sort of patient disdain. "The world is so sure, so contented, isn't it?" the youth demanded of her, whether in innocence or irony she could not tell. "People are trained, or they train themselves, by the millions, to think of things in exactly one way." He who had once been "Gargoyle" looked piercingly into the eyes of this one being to whom at least he was not afraid to speak. "Anything you or I might guess outside of what other people might accept," the boy reminded her, austerely, "could be called by just one unpleasant name." He regarded the face turned to his, recognizing the hunger in it, with a mature and pitying candor, concluding: "After to-day we must never speak of these things. I shall never dare, you must never dare--and so--" He who had once been "Gargoyle" suddenly dropped his head forward on his breast, muttering--"and so, that is all." Evelyn Strang rose. She stood tall and imperious in the waning afternoon light. She was bereaved mother, anguished wife; she was a dreamer driven out of the temple of the dream, and what she had to do was desperate. Her voice came hard and resolute.