e young fellow, still anxiously searching her face, dropped his voice.
"You are the only person I dare tell this to--for I understand the
world--" She noted that he spoke as if "the world" were a kind of plant
whose needs he had fathomed. "But after that," concluded Berber,
speaking as if quite to himself--"after that I somehow came to see that
I had been--well, educated _backward_."

She moved impatiently; the youth, seeing the question in her face,
answered the demand of its trembling eagerness, explaining:

"Do you not see--I have--sometimes _known_, not 'guessed' nor
'believed,' but _known_ that death was a wonderful, happy thing--a
fulfilment, a satisfaction to him who dies--but I have been educated
backward into a life where people cannot seem to help regarding it as a
sad thing. And----"

"Yes?--Yes?" breathed the eager woman. "Tell me--tell me----"

But he had come suddenly to a full stop. As if appalled to find only
empty words, or no words at all, for some astounding knowledge he would
communicate to her, he stammered painfully; then, as if he saw himself
caught in guilt, colored furiously. Evelyn Strang could see the
inevitable limitations of his world training creep slowly over him like
cement hardening around the searching roots of his mind. She marveled.
She remembered Strang's pet phrase, "the plaster of Paris of so-called
'normal thinking.'" Then the youth's helpless appeal came to her:

"Do you not think that I am doing wrong to speak of these things?"
Berber asked, with dignity.

The mistress of Heartholm was silent. Recklessly she put by all Doctor
Mach's prophecies. She could not stop here; her whole soul demanded that
she go further. There were old intuitions--the belief that she and
Strang had shared together, that, under rationalized schemes of thought,
knowledge of inestimable hope was being hidden from the world. Here was
this boy of the infinite vision, of the "_backward educated_" mind,
ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe. Could she strike
him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the open grave
and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips!

Suddenly, as if in answer to her struggle, Berber spoke. She was aware
that he looked at her curiously with a sort of patient disdain.

"The world is so sure, so contented, isn't it?" the youth demanded of
her, whether in innocence or irony she could not tell. "People are
trained, or they train themselves, by the m