"We are not ready for it," replied Challis. "You can't teach metaphysics to children." Nevertheless my ardour was increased, not abated, by my long talk with Challis. "I shall go on," I said, as I went out to the farm gate with him at half-past two in the morning. "Ah! well," he answered, "I shall come over and see you when I come back." He had told me earlier that he was going abroad for some months. We hesitated a moment by the gate, and instinctively we both looked up at the vault of the sky and the glimmering dust of stars. The same thought was probably in both our minds, the thought of the insignificance of this little system that revolves round one of the lesser lights of the Milky Way, but that thought was not to be expressed save by some banality, and we did not speak. "I shall certainly look you up when I come back," said Challis. "Yes; I hope you will," I said lamely. I watched the loom of his figure against the vague background till I could distinguish it no longer. CHAPTER XV THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY SUBJECTION I The memory of last summer is presented to me now as a series of pictures, some brilliant, others vague, others again so uncertain that I cannot be sure how far they are true memories of actual occurrences, and how far they are interwoven with my thoughts and dreams. I have, for instance, a recollection of standing on Deane Hill and looking down over the wide panorama of rural England, through a driving mist of fine rain. This might well be counted among true memories, were it not for the fact that clearly associated with the picture is an image of myself grown to enormous dimensions, a Brocken spectre that threatened the world with titanic gestures of denouncement, and I seem to remember that this figure was saying: "All life runs through my fingers like a handful of dry sand." And yet the remembrance has not the quality of a dream.