.

"Yes, of course. Where did you learn hypnotism?"

"By the side of the river."

"You talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night," remarked Darcy,
in a voice prickly with reason.

"Rather. I felt quite giddy. Look, I remembered to order a dreadful
daily paper for you. You can read about money markets or politics or
cricket matches."

Darcy looked at him closely. In the morning light Frank looked even
fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the
sight of him somehow dinted Darcy's armor of commonsense.

"You are the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw," he said. "I want to
ask you some more questions."

"Ask away," said Frank.

* * * * *

For the next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions,
objections and criticisms on the theory of life and gradually got out of
him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief then,
Frank believed that "by lying naked," as he put it, to the force which
controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding
of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a way
hitherto undreamed of in possessing himself of the essential principle
of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in
closer union with the great power itself which caused all life to be,
the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he
confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him
that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did
not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human
beings, just as it existed in trees and animals; to realize and make
living to himself the fact that it was all one, was his sole aim and
object.

Here perhaps Darcy would put in a word of warning. "Take care," he said.
"To see Pan meant death, did it not?"

Frank's eyebrows would rise at this.

"What does that matter?" he said. "True, the Greeks were always right,
and they said so, but there is another possibility. For the nearer I get
to it, the more living, the more vital and young I become."

"What then do you expect the final revelation will do for you?"

"I have told you," said he. "It will make me immortal."

But it was not so much from speech and argument that Darcy grew to grasp
his friend's conception, as from the ordinary conduct of his life. They
were passing, for instance, one morning down the