"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 walk home across the mountains.

Behind the play of these darker impressions, as yet only vague and
ambiguous, there ran in and out among his thoughts the vein of something
much sweeter. Miriam, with her large grey eyes and silvery voice, was
continually peeping in upon his mind. He wondered where she was and what
she was doing in the big, lonely house. He wished she could have been in
the room to hear his answers and approve them. He felt incomplete without
her. Already he thought of her as the melody to which he was the
accompaniment, two things that ought not to be separated.

"My point is," Mr. Skale continued, "that, apart from ordinary human
ties, and so forth, you have no intrinsic terror of death--of losing your
present body?"