fog, and our train had crashed
into a goods-train.

"I didn't ask him about the people who were with me. You see, there
was no need to ask.

"Very gently my uncle began to tell me, but--I had begun to talk
strangely, I suppose. I remember the frightened look of my uncle's
face, and the nurse scolding him in whispers.

"After that, all a blur. It seems that I became very ill indeed,
wasn't expected to live.

"However, I live."

There was a long silence. Laider did not look at me, nor I at him.
The fire was burning low, and he watched it.

At length he spoke:

"You despise me. Naturally. I despise myself."

"No, I don't despise you; but--"

"You blame me." I did not meet his gaze. "You blame me," he repeated.

"Yes."

"And there, if I may say so, you are a little unjust. It isn't my
fault that I was born weak."

"But a man may conquer his weakness."

"Yes, if he is endowed with the strength for that."

His fatalism drew from me a gesture of disgust.

"Do you really mean," I asked, "that because you didn't pull that cord,
you COULDN'T have pulled it?"

"Yes."

"And it's written in your hands that you couldn't?"

He looked at the palms of his hands.

"They are the hands of a very weak man," he said.

"A man so weak that he cannot believe in the possibility of free will
for himself or for any one?"

"They are the hands of an intelligent man, who can weigh evidence and
see things as they are."

"But answer me: Was it foreordained that you should not pull that cord?"

"It was foreordained."

"And was it actually marked in your hands that you were not going to
pull it?"

"Ah, well, you see, it is rather the things one IS going to do that are
actually marked. The things one isn't going to do,--the innumerable
negative things,--how could one expect THEM to be marked?"

"But the consequences of what one leaves undone may be positive?"

"Horribly positive. My hand is the hand of a man who has suffered a
great deal in later life."

"And was it the hand of a man DESTINED to suffer?"

"Oh, yes. I thought I told you that."

There was a pause.

"Well," I said, with awkward sympathy, "I suppose all hands are the
hands of people destined to suffer."

"Not of people destined to suffer so much as _I_ have suffered--as I
still suffer."

The insistence of his self-pity chilled me, and I harked back to a
question he had not straightly answered.

"Tell me: Was it marked in your hands t