Mr. Bradley received this remark with surprise. “Death is nothing,” he declared. “All music is a preparation for death. It is a foretaste of it. In music you live as you will live then, not as you live now at ordinary times; and you are fond of music. All that you see about you is only the reflection of the other world.” He took Grif’s hand and patted it gently. “This hand here is nothing,” he said. “All it can do is to feel pain. It is not _you_, it is not even a part of you, it is no more a part of you than those old stones are. When you are dreaming and happy do you ever miss your body? You have forgotten about it, though it may be lying there, tossing a poor aching head upon your pillow. Yet when you are dreaming you are alive, and playing in beautiful meadows, and bathing in rivers, or singing music, or doing any of the things you like to do at ordinary times――only far more perfectly, and without any effort or tiredness. When you look at me now I can see your spirit peeping out of your eyes. It is like you, but it is brighter, gayer; it is laughing and merry, while you are frightened and sad. If I called to it, ‘Grif! Grif!’ it would try to jump out and scamper away over the fields. It would stand there for a moment on your forehead while it shook out its wings: then――pouff!――it would be gone, and I should see it glistening like a rainbow in the sunlight, and dancing over the old graves and over the wall and over the church tower and over the tops of the trees. And I should hear it singing, away――up, up in the air, like a little brown lark.” Grif began to laugh, and Mr. Bradley seeing him laugh laughed too, though his eyes still shone with their strange yellow light. “What time is it, please?” the little boy asked, and Mr. Bradley looked at his watch. “Ten minutes to six. Time is another nuisance you would be rid of.” But Grif, finding himself free, had jumped to his feet. “I must go,” he said quickly. “Tea is at six and I promised not to be late. I hate promising things, because it makes you break your word when you don’t mean to. Good-bye.” He was gone before Mr. Bradley could even take a pinch of snuff. CHAPTER XV DANGER ‘Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood; Good things of day begin to droop and drowse.’ ――_Shakespeare._ Jim once more dipped his finger into the pot, and then proceeded to suck it luxuriously. “I say, you might leave just a little,” Palmer remonstrated. “Of course if you’re very keen on it――――” ‘It’ was a brownish, extremely unattractive-looking preparation, of a treacly nature, which Palmer had compounded with the intention of smearing the trunks of the trees after dark, to entrap moths for his collection. Jim protested virtuously: