as I suspect, something more occult, and therefore more interesting?”      

       “Rick, boy,” said Tim, “you're too—inquiring!” And he turned to his desk with a look of delicate hauteur.     

       It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who, having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. The dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of sociable silence.     

       “Rick,” he said, “do you know that Fear has a Shape?”      

       “And so has my nose!”      

       “You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my confession to you. What I fear is Fear.”      

       “That's because you've drunk too much—or not enough.     

   “'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring Your winter garment of repentance fling—'”  

       “My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts.”      

       “For an agnostic that seems a bit—”      

       “Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts—no—no things which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done—”      

       “Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'”      

       Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and there was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed away the moist hair from his haggard face—that face which would look like the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.     

       “'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'” he murmured drowsily, “'it is   

 Prev. P 5/61 next