see whether he could find any thing new at the bottom of it.  “I can’t see that my ideas are so brutally shocking.  We may some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and immortality.  We have got far more than half way.  Infinity is infinitely more intelligible to you than you are to a sponge.  If the soul of a sponge can grow to be the soul of a Darwin, why may we not all grow up to abstract truth?  What more do you want?”

As he looked up again, saying these words without thinking of Esther’s interest, he was startled to see that this time she was listening with a very different expression in her face.  She broke in with a question which staggered him.

“Does your idea mean that the next world is a sort of great reservoir of truth, and that what is true in us just pours into it like raindrops?”

“Well!” said he, alarmed and puzzled:  “the figure is not perfectly correct, but the idea is a little of that kind.”

“After all I wonder whether that may not be what Niagara has been telling me!” said Esther, and she spoke with an outburst of energy that made Strong’s blood run cold.

Chapter X

Strong kept his word about amusing the two girls.  They were not allowed the time to make themselves unhappy, restless or discontented.  This Sunday afternoon he set out with a pair of the fastest horses to be got in the neighborhood, and if these did not go several times over the cliff, it was, as Strong had said, rather their own good sense than their driver’s which held them back.  Catherine, who sat by Strong’s side, made the matter worse by taking the reins, and a more reckless little Amazon never defied men.  Even Strong himself at one moment, when wreck seemed certain, asked her to kindly see to the publication of a posthumous memoir, and Esther declared that although she did not fear death, she disliked Catherine’s way of killing her.  Catherine paid no attention to such ribaldry, and drove on like Phaeton.  Wharton was carried away by the girl’s dash and coolness.  He wanted to paint her as the charioteer of the cataract.  They drove by the whirlpool, and so far and fast that, when Esther found herself that night tossing and feverish in her bed, she could only dream that she was still skurrying over a snow-bound country, aching with jolts and jerks, but unable ever to stop.  The next day she was glad to stay quietly in the house and amuse herself with sketching, while the rest of the party crossed the river to get Mr. Murray’s sleeping-berth by the night train to New York, and to waste their time and money on the small attractions of the village.  Mr. Murray was forced to return to his office.  Wharton, who had no right to be here at all, for a score of pressing engagements were calling for instant attention in New York, telegraphed simply that his work would detain him several days longer at Niagara, and he even talked of returning with the others by way of Quebec.