"They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in
literature."

"I hope you won't get to thinking about her, then," his mother entreated,
intelligibly but not definitely.

"Not seriously," Verrian reassured her. "I've had my medicine."




V.

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a
life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event
that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series
of recurrences by which each one's episode shares in the unending history
of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses to
accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the shattered
hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on unbrokenly, and
when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life here, the defeated
faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and the belief of
immortality holds against the myriad years in which none of the
numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it. The
lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed habit
mechanically attempts its repetition when the conditions render it
impossible.

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the