e. It was as if the truth,
so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the
repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a
hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly
against the old man's doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of
question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in
belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not
something which he was _sharing_ with Hilbrook; he was _giving_ it
absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his
own soul of its most precious possession.

So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook's visits
left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been
making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put
this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a
cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the
old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that
the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and
stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered
that he never felt better in his life. "But you," he said, casting an
eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his
easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, "_you_, look
rather peaked. I don't know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I
seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit
yesterday."

"It was a very close day," said Ewbert. "I don't know why I shouldn't be
about as well as usual."

"Well, that's right," said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle
which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.

Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions
they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found
himself beset by a strange temptation,--by the wish to take up these
notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their
common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition,
but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to
break them one by one and cast them in the old man's face. Like all
imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions,
whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous
the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fasci