The small town-street, quiet and empty in the summer eventide, stretched to right and left, with a gabled and timbered house or two, and fairly seemed to have cleared itself to congruity with the historic void over which our friends, lingering an instant to converse, looked at each other. The young wife, rather, looked about a moment at all there wasn't to be seen, and then, before Gedge had found a reply to her husband's remark, uttered, evidently in the interest of conciliation, a little question of her own that she tried to make earnest. "It's our unfortunate ignorance, you mean, that doesn't?" "Unfortunate or fortunate. I like it so," said the husband. "'The play's the thing.' Let the author alone." Gedge, with his key on his forefinger, leaned against the door-post, took in the stupid little street and was sorry to see them go--they seemed so to abandon him. "That's just what They won't do--nor let _me_ do. It's all I want--to let the author alone. Practically"--he felt himself getting the last of his chance--"there is no author; that is for us to deal with. There are all the immortal people--_in_ the work; but there's nobody else." "Yes," said the young man--"that's what it comes to. There should really, to clear the matter up, be no such Person." "As you say," Gedge returned, "it's what it comes to. There _is_ no such Person." The evening air listened, in the warm thick midland stillness, while the wife's little cry rang out. "But _wasn't_ there----?" "There was somebody," said Gedge against the door-post. "But They've killed Him. And, dead as He is, They keep it up, They do it over again, They kill Him every day." He was aware of saying this so grimly--more than he wished--that his companions exchanged a glance and even perhaps looked as if they felt him extravagant. That was really the way Isabel had warned him all the others would be looking if he should talk to Them as he talked to _her_. He liked, however, for that matter, to hear how he should sound when pronounced incapable through deterioration of the brain. "Then if there's no author, if there's nothing to be said but that there isn't anybody," the young woman smilingly asked, "why in the world should there be a house?" "There shouldn't," said Morris Gedge. Decidedly, yes, he affected the young man. "Oh, I don't say, mind you, that you should pull it down!" "Then where would you _go_?" their companion sweetly inquired. "That's what my wife asks," Gedge returned. "Then keep it up, keep it up!" And the husband held out his hand. "That's what my wife says," Gedge went on as he shook it. The young woman, charming creature, emulated the other visitor; she offered their remarkable friend her handshake. "Then mind your wife." The poor man faced her gravely. "I would if she were such a wife as you!" VI