"I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning." A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting. "Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man. Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a stranger's--repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?" "Did you see who shot you?" said the voice. And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?" "Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice. He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner Revercomb or one of his own multitude of selves that had shot him. It made no difference--nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable sense of approaching discovery which he had lost. "Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly. He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer. "It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous." It was there again--the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him. CHAPTER XVI THE END In the middle of the afternoon Molly went into the spare room in the west wing, and stopped beside the high white bed on which Gay was lying, with the sheet turned down from his face. In death his features wore a look of tranquil brightness, of arrested energy, as if he had paused suddenly for a brief space, and meant to rise and go on again about the absorbing business of living. The windows were open, and through the closed shutters floated a pale greenish light and the sound of dead leaves rustling softly in the garden.