ould be given the opportunity of considering their souls. If
they refused to consider them, they must not complain if they find the
next world but little to their fancy.

No one had ever attacked Olva before on this subject. His reserve had
been more alarming to the Soul Hunters than the coarse violence of a
Cardillac or a Carfax. And now Bunning--Bunning of all people in this
ridiculous world--had ventured. Well, there was pluck necessary for
that. Bunning, the coward, had done a braver thing than many more
stalwart men would have cared to do. There was bravery there!

Moreover, why should not Olva go? He could not sit alone in his room,
his nerves would soon be too many for him. What did it matter? His last
evening of freedom should be spent as no other evening of his life had
been spent. . . . Moreover, might there not be something behind this
business? Might he not, perhaps, be shown to-night some clue to the
presence of that Power that had spoken to him in the wood? Through all
the tangled confusion of his thoughts, through the fear and courage
there ran this note-where was God? . . . God the only person to Whom he
now could speak, because God knew.

Might not this idiot of a Bunning have been shown the way to the
mystery?

"Yes," said Olva, smiling. "I'll come, if you won't mind sitting down
and smoking for a quarter of an hour, while I finish this--have a drink,
will you?"

Bunning's consternation at Olva's acceptance was amusing. He dropped his
cap, stopped to pick it up, gasped. That Dune should really come!

"You'll come?" he spluttered out. Never in his wildest imaginings had he
fancied such a thing. Dune, the most secret, reserved, mysterious man in
the college--Dune, whose sarcastic smile was considered more terrifying
than Lawrence's mailed fist--Dune, towards whom in the back of his mind
there had been paid that reverence that belongs only to those who are of
another world.

Never, in anything that had happened to him, had Bunning been so
terrified as he had been by this visit to Dune. Watson Morley, the
Christian Union man, had insisted that it was his duty and therefore
he had come, but it had taken him ten minutes of agony to climb those
stairs. And now Dune had accepted. . . .

The colour flooded his cheeks and faded again. He sat down clumsily in
a chair, felt for a pipe that he smoked unwillingly because it was the
manly thing to do, spurted some Apollinaris into a glass and over
the table