‘I don’t believe it,’ said Isabel. ‘Pain is absolutely horrible. I am a coward about it. I loathe and dread it altogether. Pain and death--dying, rather--are awful to me. I love being alive and warm in the blessed world. Dissolution is ghastly. For nothing would I give up the joy of living. Oh, agony is too horrible. It’s not a lesson so much as a punishment. Oh yes, a punishment, even if it’s for something one has done hundreds of years ago, before one was in this body at all.’ ‘Oh, what a dreadful idea!’ cried Gundred, shocked--‘a terrible unchristian idea!’ ‘Not at all,’ contributed Kingston; ‘what about the blind man in the Temple? They asked Christ, “Did this man sin, or his parents, that he was born blind?” How could he have sinned, then, before he was born, except in some other existence? And Christ passed the question. If He had disbelieved the theory of reincarnation, He was quite capable of saying so very definitely. But He did not. By His silence He implicitly admitted its truth, instead of challenging it, and devoted Himself to the healing of the blind man.’ ‘So wonderfully hot it is in here to-night,’ said Gundred. ‘I always feel,’ went on Isabel, ‘whenever I have a bad time, I am paying for having enjoyed a too good one once in a wrong way. I expect this broken leg of mine is the result of some selfish enjoyment of mine in bygone days that I have forgotten. I had prepared this penalty for myself in some mysterious way. For these things come automatically. Touch a button--commit the tiniest, wee-est action, good or bad--and years and years later, long after one has thought the action dead and forgotten, something happens that shows it has been alive and steadily working from the first hour to the last. Every littlest thing that happens, pleasant or painful, can always be traced back, I expect, to some cause, infinitely small and infinitely remote in the past, far, far away beyond one’s recollection.’ ‘Don’t you wonder,’ said Kingston, ‘what your actions of yesterday and to-day will produce, and how long it will be before their effects come down upon us? We shall probably have forgotten all about to-day by then, but everything that we have done must bear some sort of fruit some day or other, as you say. Your accident, for instance, will have some effect upon us, and Nurse Molly must make some change in our lives, sooner or later. If one cannot introduce a fresh action without effect into our lives, still less can one introduce a fresh person. Nurse Molly, with her marvellous fringe, will certainly bring some new element with her into our lives. Now, what will it be, Isabel?’ Gundred saw a chance of being apposite.