in"--

Hilbrook replied calmly, "I heard you; I wa'n't asleep."

"Oh," said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do;
he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to
do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who
were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, "Is
there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by"--

"I ha'n't got any call to get up," said Hilbrook; and, after giving
Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly,
"What was that you said about my wantin' to be alive enough to know I
was dead?"

"The consciousness of unconsciousness?"

"Ah!" the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the
notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: "There ain't
anything _in_ that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and
the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don't prove anything at all,
and all that we worked out of it had to go with it."

"Well," the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his
tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the
hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook's room,
"let's see if we can't put that notion together again."

"_You_ can, if you want to," said the old man, dryly "I got no interest
in it any more; 'twa'n't nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway." He
turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his
visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to
philosophize further.

"I was sorry," Ewbert began, "not to be able to speak with you after
church, the other day. There were so many people"--

"That's all right," said Hilbrook unresentfully. "I hadn't anything to
say, in particular."

"But _I_ had," the minister persisted. "I thought a great deal about you
when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many
times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had
felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don't say final
truth, for I don't suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life."

"Very likely," Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. "I don't
see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don't care for it."

Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate
usefulness than the psychological question. "Couldn't I get you
something to eat, Mr.