“I would not call such a beautiful union as theirs might have been by such a name.  For myself, I confess to a very real desire for pleasure first and happiness afterwards.”

“I know you better than you think, Mr. Griggs.  You are merely argumentative, rarely sceptical.  If I had begun by denying what I instead asserted, you would by this time have been arguing as strongly on my side as you now are on yours.  You are often very near degenerating into a common sophist.”

“Very likely, it was a charming profession.  Meanwhile, by going to the very opposite extreme from sophistry, I mean by a more than Quixotic veneration for an abstract dogma you hold to be true, and by your determination to make people die for it, you are causing fearful misery of body, untold agony of soul, to a woman and a man whom you should have every reason to like.  Go to, Ram Lal, adept, magician, enthusiast, and prophet, you are mistaken, like all your kind!”

“No, I am not mistaken, time will show.  Moreover, I would have you remark that the lady in question is not suffering at all, and that the ‘untold agony of soul’ you attribute to Isaacs is a wholesome medicine for one with such a soul as his.  And now I am going, for you are not the sort of person with whom I can enjoy talking very long.  You are violent and argumentative, though you are sometimes amusing.  I am rarely violent, and I never argue:  life is too short.  And yet I have more time for it than you, seeing my life will be indefinitely longer than yours.  Good-bye, for the present; and believe me, those two will be happier far, and far more blessed, in a few short years hence, than ever you or I shall be in all the unreckonable cycles of this or any future world.”  Ram Lal sighed as he uttered the last words, and he was gone; yet the musical cadence of the deep-drawn breath of a profound sorrow, vibrated whisperingly through the room where I lay.  Poor Ram Lal, he must have had some disappointment in his youth, which, with all his wisdom and superiority over the common earth, still left a sore place in his heart.

I was not inclined to move.  I knew where Isaacs was, where he would remain to the bitter end, and I would not go out into the world that day, while he was kneeling in the chamber of death.  He might come back at any time.  How long would it last?  God in his mercy grant it might be soon and quickly over, without suffering.  Oh! but those strong people die so deathly hard.  I have seen a man—­No, I was sure of that.  She would not suffer any more now.

I lay thinking.  Would Isaacs send for me when he returned, or would he face his grief alone for a night before he spoke?  The latter, I thought; I hoped so too.  How little sympathy there must be for any one, even the dearest, in our souls and hearts, when it is so hard to look forward to speaking half-a-dozen words of comfort to some poor wretch of a friend who has lost everything in the wide world