him seriously. The only
way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And
yet I couldn't, you know--it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I
tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving
bosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine
with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind
before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross,
very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty
often....

The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was
abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland
voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had
made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the
wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all
swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the
stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky,
looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches
and emerged on the white glen highway.

Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had
somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and
Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour
ago. It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," when
the mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on the
morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Those
airy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns!

"I want to hear the end of your story," I told him, as the lights of
the Lodge showed half a mile distant.

"The end was a tragedy," he said slowly. "I don't much care to talk
about it. But how was I to know? I couldn't see the nerve going. You
see I couldn't believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have
seen. But I still think there was something in it--up to a point. Oh,
I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something
must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more
which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...

"I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started
I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed
my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words--'I
know at last--God's mercy.--H.G.H' The handwrit