materialist philosophy and faith in the
spiritual unseen. If at that moment he could have decided between the
two he would gladly have done so, for the sake of the eager woman
sitting at his feet, but he knew that he did not know which was the
truth.

She, still labouring under the impression that she had not made her
meaning plain, endeavoured to explain. 'Ye knows when a man dies,
there's two parts to him; one they buries, and one goes--' she pointed
upward with her thumb, not irreverently, but as merely wishing to
indicate a fact without the expense of words.

'Yes, I understand what you mean,' he said slowly, 'and under that
theory, the soul----'

'Under what?' she said sharply.

'I mean that if you say the soul is divided from the body at death----'

'But it is--ain't it?' she interrupted.

'Yes, it is,' he said, feeling that it was better to perjure himself
than to shake her faith.

'Go on,' she said, 'for parson says the soael is the thing inside that
thinks; but when a man's luny, ye knows--off his head like--has he no
soael then? I've looked i' the Catechis', an' i' Bible, an' i'
Prayer-book, an' fur the life o' me, I doaen't know.'

'I don't wonder at that,' he said, with mechanical compassion, casting
about in his mind for some possible motive for her extraordinary
vehemence.

He felt as certain, standing there, that this was a true woman, true to
all the highest attributes of her nature, as if he had been able to
weigh all the acts of her life and find none of them wanting. In the
midst of his perplexity he found time to ask himself whence he had this
knowledge. Did he read it in the lines of her face, or was it some
unseen influence of her mind upon his own? He had only time to question,
not to answer, for she looked up in his face with the trust and
expectation of a child, awaiting his words.

He spoke. 'You say when a man dies he is divided into two parts--the
body that rots and the part "that lives elsewhere."' He was speaking
very slowly and distinctly. 'If that part of a man which lives goes to
Heaven, where everything is quite different from this, he could have no
use for most of his thoughts--what we call opinions, for they are formed
on what he sees, and hears, and feels here. Look here!'--he held out his
arm and moved it up and down from the elbow--'there are nerves and
muscles; behind them is something we call life--we don't know what it
is. And behind your thoughts and feeling there