Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding himself gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of a dream. He had in a sense followed this long, loosely stitched, preliminary argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat there between two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely on any single fragment of Herbert’s apology, or of rousing himself into being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: ‘But surely, I don’t quite see...’ Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor’s acumen and set it down again without tasting it. ‘Why, my dear fellow,’ he said triumphantly, ‘even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide. Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men _don’t_ tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly fertilizing. It catches one’s fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one’s imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?’ ‘I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call it—“darkening counsel”? It’s “the hair of the dog,” Mr Lawford.’