ligence, most certainly," was the emphatic reply.

"And spirits?"

Spinrobin hesitated. He was a very honest soul.

"Other life, let me put it," the clergyman helped him; "other beings
besides ourselves?"

"I have often felt--wondered, rather," he answered carefully, "whether
there might not be other systems of evolution besides humanity. Such
extraordinary Forces come blundering into one's life sometimes, and one
can't help wondering where they come from. I have never formulated any
definite beliefs, however--"

"Your world is not a blind chaos, I mean?" Mr. Skale put gravely to him,
as though questioning a child.

"No, no, indeed. There's order and system--"

"In which you personally count for something of value?" asked the
other quickly.

"I like to think so," was the apologetic reply. "There's something that
includes me somewhere in a purpose of very great importance--only, of
course, I've got to do my part, and--"

"Good," Mr. Skale interrupted him. "And now," he asked softly, after
a moment's pause, leaning forward, "what about death? Are you afraid
of death?"

Spinrobin started visibly. He began to wonder where this extraordinary
catechism was going to lead. But he answered at once: he had thought out
these things and knew where he stood.

"Only of its possible pain," he said, smiling into the bearded visage
before him. "And an immense curiosity, of course--"

"It does not mean extinction for you--going out like the flame of a
candle, for instance?"

"I have never been able to believe _that_, Mr. Skale. I continue
somewhere and somehow--forever."

The cross-examination puzzled him more and more, and through it, for the
first time, he began to feel dimly, ran a certain strain of something not
quite right, not permissible in the biggest sense. It was not the
questions themselves that produced this odd and rather disquieting
impression, but the fact that Mr. Skale was preparing the ground with
such extraordinary thoroughness. This conversation was the first swell,
as it were, rolling mysteriously in upon him from the ocean in whose
deeps the great Experiment lay buried. Forces, tidal in strength, oceanic
in volume, shrouded it just now, but he already felt them. They reached
him through the person of the clergyman. It was these forces playing
through his personality that Spinrobin had been aware of the first moment
they met on the station platform, and had "sensed" even more strongly
during the wa