"When I am well I believe in new, full, rich, wonderful life--in life in the spiritual as well as the mortal sphere. And the Body, when he is ill, he, too, thinks of that which is your heritage. But if _you_ are not sure--if _you_ know nothing--may it not be that you, too, have fed upon dreams, and have dallied with Will-o'-the-wisp, and are an idle-blown flame even as I am, and have only a vaster spiritual outlook? May it not be that you, O Soul, are but a spiritual nerve in the dark, confused, brooding mind of Humanity? May it not be that you and I and the Body go down unto one end?" "Not so. There is the word of God." "We read it differently." "Yet the Word remains." "You believe in the immortal life?--You believe in Eternity?" "Yes." "Then what is Eternity?" "Already you have asked me that!" "You believe in Eternity. What is Eternity?" "Continuity." "And what are the things of Eternity?" "Immortal desires." "Then what need for us who are mortal to occupy ourselves with what must be for ever beyond us?" Thereat, with a harsh laugh, the Will arose, and throwing his garments from him, plunged into the sunlit green water, with sudden cries of joy calling to the Body, who was still rejoicefully swimming in the sun-dazzle as he breasted the tide. An hour later we rose, and, silent again, once more resumed our way. IV It was about the middle of the afternoon that we moved inland, because of a difficult tract of cliff and bouldered shore. We followed the course of a brown torrent, and were soon under the shadow of the mountain. The ewes and lambs made incessantly that mournful crying, which in mountain solitudes falls from ledge to ledge as though it were no other than the ancient sorrow of the hills. Thence we emerged, walking among boulders green with moss and grey with lichen, often isled among bracken and shadowed by the wind-wavering birches, or the finger-leafed rowans already heavy with clusters of ruddy fruit. Sometimes we spoke of things which interested us: of the play of light and shadow in the swirling brown torrent along whose banks we walked, and by whose grayling-haunted pools we lingered often, to look at the beautiful shadowy unrealities of the perhaps not less shadowy reality which they mirrored: of the solemn dusk of the pines; of the mauve shadows which slanted across the scanty corn that lay in green patches beyond lonely crofts; of the travelling purple phantoms of phantom clouds, to us invisible, over against the mountain-breasts; of a solitary seamew, echoing the wave in that inland stillness. All these things gave us keen pleasure. The Body often laughed joyously, and talked of chasing the shadow till it should turn and leap into him, and he be a wild creature of the woods again, and be happy, knowing nothing but the incalculable hour. It is an old belief of the Gaelic hill-people.