lie
down and die.'"

A little while afterwards he said, "How strange it is that the loneliness
of this place should be so delightful! I like my fellow-beings on the
whole--I don't want to avoid them or to abolish them--but yet it is one of
the greatest luxuries in the world to find a place where one is pretty sure
of not meeting one of them."

"Yes," I said, "it is very odd! I have been feeling to-day that I should
like time to stand still this summer afternoon, and to spend whole days in
rambling about here. I won't say," I said with a smile, "that I should
prefer to be quite alone; but I shouldn't mind even that in a place like
this. I never feel like that in a big town--there is always a sense of
hostile currents there. To be alone in a town is always rather melancholy;
but here it is just the reverse."

"Indeed, yes," said Father Payne, "and it is one of the great mysteries of
all to me what we really want with company. It does not actually take away
from us our sense of loneliness at all. You can't look into my mind, nor
can I look into yours; whatever we do or say to break down the veil between
us, we can't do it. And I have often been happier when alone than I have
ever been in any company."

"Isn't it a sense of security?" I said; "I suppose that it is an instinct
derived from old savage days which makes us dread other human beings. The
further back you go, the more hatred and mistrust you find; and I suppose
that the presence of a friend, or rather of someone with whom one has a
kind of understanding, gives a feeling of comparative safety against
attack."

"That's it, no doubt," said Father Payne; "but if I had to choose between
spending the rest of my life in solitude, or in spending it without a
chance of solitude, I should be in a great difficulty. I am afraid that I
regard company rather as a wholesome medicine against the evils of solitude
than I regard solitude as a relief from company. After all, what is it that
we want with each other?--what do we expect to get from each other? I
remember," he said, smiling, "a witty old lady saying to me once that
eternity was a nightmare to her.--'For instance,' she said, 'I enjoy
sitting here and talking to you very much; but if I thought it was going on
to all eternity, I shouldn't like it at all.' Do we really want the company
of any one for ever and ever? And if so, why? Do we want to agree or to
disagree? Is the point of it that we want similarity or differ