“Perhaps it is just as well,” he said to himself. “She said she would come with me—perhaps that is just as well. She will go to the sea. When she knows, the sea will take her. She must know.” He took a card, bearing her name and her Cornwall address, from his pocket-book, and laid it on the dressing-table. “She will come with me,” he said to himself, and his heart rose with elation. “That is a cowardice,” he added, looking doubtfully at the card, as if wondering whether to destroy it. “It is in the hands of God. Beatrice may or may not send word to her at Tintagel. It is in the hands of God,” he concluded. Then he sat down again. “‘But for that fear of something after-death,’” he quoted to himself. “It is not fear,” he said. “The act itself will be horrible and fearsome, but the after-death—it’s no more than struggling awake when you’re sick with a fright of dreams. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’” Siegmund sat thinking of the after-death, which to him seemed so wonderfully comforting, full of rest, and reassurance, and renewal. He experienced no mystical ecstasies. He was sure of a wonderful kindness in death, a kindness which really reached right through life, though here he could not avail himself of it. Siegmund had always inwardly held faith that the heart of life beat kindly towards him. When he was cynical and sulky he knew that in reality it was only a waywardness of his. The heart of life is implacable in its kindness. It may not be moved to fluttering of pity; it swings on uninterrupted by cries of anguish or of hate. Siegmund was thankful for this unfaltering sternness of life. There was no futile hesitation between doom and pity. Therefore, he could submit and have faith. If each man by his crying could swerve the slow, sheer universe, what a doom of guilt he might gain. If Life could swerve from its orbit for pity, what terror of vacillation; and who would wish to bear the responsibility of the deflection? Siegmund thanked God that life was pitiless, strong enough to take his treasures out of his hands, and to thrust him out of the room; otherwise, how could he go with any faith to death; otherwise, he would have felt the helpless disillusion of a youth who finds his infallible parents weaker than himself. “I know the heart of life is kind,” said Siegmund, “because I feel it. Otherwise I would live in defiance. But Life is greater than me or anybody. We suffer, and we don’t know why, often. Life doesn’t explain. But I can keep faith in it, as a dog has faith in his master. After all, Life is as kind to me as I am to my dog. I have, proportionally, as much zest. And my purpose towards my dog is good. I need not despair of Life.” It occurred to Siegmund that he was meriting the old gibe of the atheists. He was shirking the responsibility of himself, turning it over to an imaginary god. “Well,” he said, “I can’t help it. I do not feel altogether self-responsible.”