loss of oneself by substitution--far worse than death, and not even
annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches
ours, where the veil between has worn thin"--horrors! he was using my very
own phrase, my actual words--"so that they are aware of our being in their
neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming
overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded
more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the
fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and
look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of
another region--not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly
different in kind--where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and
terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which
earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires,
the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast
purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with
more expressions of the soul--"

"I suggest just now--" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I
was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his
torrent that had to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought