Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the
pleasure of teasing his wife.

"That'll be a great comfort to Marion," he said, and he threw back his
head and laughed.

She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure
in teasing her.

"Where have you been," I asked, "that you don't know the changed attitude
in these matters?"

"Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after
we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I
haven't really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up
twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn't
complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We
were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned
anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls."

Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, taking his knee between
his hands again.

"You know," she explained, more in my direction than to me, "that I had
none to begin with. But Alderling had. His people believed in the future
life."

"That's what they said," Alderling crowed. "And Marion has always thought
that if she had believed that way, she could have kept me up to it; and
so when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly logical, though