't
want to argue immortality any more; we'll take that for granted. But how
is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death
taken away?"

Hilbrook's apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air
and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist
down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed
Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him
terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if
he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of
the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of
Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one
insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not
forsake him or deny him.

"I don't know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on
this matter," he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.

"You didn't go to the Book for the point you made _against_ me. But if
you go to it now for the point I want you to make _for_ me, what are you
going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different
from the life we have here? I accept it all,--all that the Old Testament
says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on
this point?"

"Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be
happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is
everything to me."

"It isn't to me!" cried the old man. "We are in the keeping of the
divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly
happy? It's because we're not conditioned for happiness here; and how
are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer
to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience,
there just as we do here."

"There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,"
Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.

"Like what?" Hilbrook demanded. "I've been trying to figure it, and I
can't. I should like you to try it. You can't imagine a new passion in
the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There
they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear!
You can't add to them or take away from them." The old man dropped from
his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. "I
wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven'