speak.  "But I'm afraid of what comes after. They tell you that it's everlasting torment—but I don't believe it. Parsons mostly tell you that. The fear has kept me from doing it. So when I heard the rector in church two weeks ago, I felt as if he'd be honest—and as if he might know—as much as any one can know. He seemed real to me, and clever—I thought it would help if I could talk to him—and I thought maybe I could trust him to tell me honestly—in confidence, you know—if he really and truly thought it was wrong for a person to kill herself. I can't see why."  She glanced at the attentive, quiet figure at the window.  "Do you think so?" she asked. He looked at her, but did not speak. She went on.  "Why is it wrong? They say God gives life and only God should take it away. Why? It's given—we don't ask for it, and no conditions come with it. Why should one, if it gets unendurable, keep an unasked, unwanted gift? If somebody put a ball of bright metal into your hands and it was pretty at first and nice to play with, and then turned red-hot, and hurt, wouldn't it be silly to go on holding it? I don't know much about God, anyway," she went on a bit forlornly; not irreverently, but as if pain had burned off the shell of conventions and reserves of every day, and actual facts lay bare.  "I don't feel as if He were especially real—and the case I'm in is awfully real. I don't know if He would mind my killing myself—and if He would, wouldn't He understand I just have to? If He's really good? But then, if He was angry, might He punish me forever, afterward?"  She drew her shoulders together with a frightened, childish movement.  "I'm afraid of forever," she said. 

 The rain beat in noisily against the parish house wall; the wet vines flung about wildly; a floating end blew in at the window and the young man lifted it carefully and put it outside again. Then, "Can you tell me why you want to kill yourself?" he asked, and his manner, free from criticism or disapproval, seemed to quiet her. 

 "Yes. I want to tell you. I came here to tell the rector."  The grave eyes of the man, eyes whose clearness and youth seemed to be such an age-old youth and clearness as one sees in the eyes of the sibyls in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel—eyes empty of a thought of self, impersonal, serene with the serenity of a large atmosphere—the unflinching eyes of the man gazed at the girl as she talked. 

 She talked rapidly, eagerly, as if each word lifted pressure.  "It's this way—I'm ill—hopelessly ill. Yes—it's absolutely so. I've got to die. Two doctors said so. But I'll live—maybe five years—possibly ten. I'm twenty-three now—and I may 

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