mean--meeting all these old people again? One never meets such
old friends again except in a dream."

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: "Are you
really there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply
dreaming?"

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word,
and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

"No, you good atheist," he cried; "no, you clean, courteous,
reverent, pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming--you are
waking up."

"What do you mean?"

"There are two states where one meets so many old friends," said
MacIan; "one is a dream, the other is the end of the world."

"And you say----"

"I say this is not a dream," said Evan in a ringing voice.

"You really mean to suggest----" began Turnbull.

"Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong," said MacIan, breathing
hard. "It's hard to explain, anyhow. An apocalypse is the
opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But
the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends. I
don't say this is really the end of the world, but it's something