en Laurie had come home,
still trying to assimilate the amazing fact, of which he said that it
could make no difference--that he had seen with his own eyes the face
of Amy Nugent four months after her death.

Now here he was in bed on the following morning, trying to assimilate
it once more.

* * * * *

It seemed to him as if sleep had done its work--that the subconscious
intelligence had been able to take the fact in--and that henceforth it
was an established thing in his experience. He was not excited now,
but he was intensely and overwhelmingly interested. There the thing
was. Now what difference did it make?

First, he understood that it made an enormous difference to the value
of the most ordinary things. It really was true--as true as tables and
chairs--that there was a life after this, and that personality
survived. Never again could he doubt that for one instant, even in the
gloomiest mood. So long as a man walks by faith, by the acceptance of
authority, human or Divine, there is always psychologically possible
the assertion of self, the instinct that what one has not personally
experienced may just conceivably be untrue. But when one has seen--so
long as memory does not disappear--this agnostic instinct is an
impossibility. Every single act therefore has a new significance.
There is no venture about it any more; there is, indeed, very little
opportunity for heroism. Once it is certain, by the evidence of the
senses, that death is just an interlude, this life becomes merely part
of a long process....

Now as to the conduct of that life--what of religion? And here, for a
moment or two, Laurie was genuinely dismayed. For, as he looked at the
Catholic religion, he perceived that the whole thing had changed. It
no longer seemed august and dominant. As he contemplated himself as he
had been at Mass on the previous morning, he seemed to have been
rather absurd. Why all this trouble, all this energy, all these
innumerable acts and efforts of faith? It was not that his religion
seemed necessarily untrue; it was certainly possible for a man to hold
simultaneously Catholic and spiritualistic beliefs; there had not been
a hint last night against Christianity, and yet, in the face of this
evidence of the senses, Catholicism seemed a very shadowy thing. It
might well be true, as any philosophy may be true, but--did it matter
very much? To be enthusiastic about it was the frenzy of an arti