‘But you know I didn’t mean it for a true one.’ ‘Who knows whether it is true or false?’ ‘_I_ know,’ said Mary: ‘I know it is false.’ ‘And _I_ hope it,’ I adjoined. ‘Whatever put such horrid things into your head, Wilfrid?’ asked Clara. ‘Probably the fear lest they should be true. The verses came as I sat in a country church once, not long ago.’ ‘In a church!’ exclaimed Mary. ‘Oh! he does go to church sometimes,’ said Charley, with a laugh. ‘How could you think of it in church?’ persisted Mary. ‘It’s more like the churchyard,’ said Clara. ‘It was in an old church in a certain desolate sea-forsaken town,’ I said. ‘The pendulum of the clock--a huge, long, heavy, slow thing--hangs far down into the church, and goes swing, swang over your head, three or four seconds to every swing. When you have heard the _tic_, your heart grows faint every time between--waiting for the _tac_, which seems as if it would never come.’ We were ascending the acclivity, and no one spoke again before we reached the top. There a wide landscape lay stretched before us. The mist was rapidly melting away before the gathering strength of the sun: as we stood and gazed we could see it vanishing. By slow degrees the colours of the Autumn woods dawned out of it. Close under us lay a great wave of gorgeous red--beeches, I think--in the midst of which, here and there, stood up, tall and straight and dark, the unchanging green of a fir-tree. The glow of a hectic death was over the landscape, melting away into the misty fringe of the far horizon. Overhead the sky was blue, with a clear thin blue that told of withdrawing suns and coming frosts. ‘For my part,’ I said, ‘I cannot believe that beyond this loveliness there lies no greater. Who knows, Charley, but death may be the first recognizable step of the progress of which you despair?’ It was then I caught the look from Mary’s eye, for the sake of which I have recorded the little incidents of the morning. But the same moment the look faded, and the veil or the mask fell over her face. ‘I am afraid,’ she said, ‘if there has been no progress before, there will be little indeed after.’ Now of all things, I hated the dogmatic theology of the party in which she had been brought up, and I turned from her with silent dislike. ‘Really,’ said Clara, ‘you gentlemen have been very entertaining this morning. One would think Polly and I had come out for a stroll with a couple of undertaker’s-men. There’s surely time enough to think of such things yet! None of us are at death’s door exactly.’ ‘“Sweet remembrancer!”--Who knows?’ said Charley. ‘“Now I, to comfort him,”’ I followed, quoting Mrs Quickly concerning Sir John Falstaff, ‘“bid him, ‘a should not think of God: I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mary--‘there was no word of Him in the matter.’