saw the whole business of my uncle's life as
something familiar and completed. It was done, like a play one leaves,
like a book one closes. I thought of the push and the promotions, the
noise of London, the crowded, various company of people through which
our lives had gone, the public meetings, the excitements, the dinners
and disputations, and suddenly it appeared to me that none of these
things existed.

It came to me like a discovery that none of these things existed.

Before and after I have thought and called life a phantasmagoria, but
never have I felt its truth as I did that night.... We had parted; we
two who had kept company so long had parted. But there was, I knew, no
end to him or me. He had died a dream death, and ended a dream; his pain
dream was over. It seemed to me almost as though I had died, too. What
did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire,
the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitary
road, this quite solitary road, along which one went rather puzzled,
rather tired....

Part of the fog became a big mastiff that came towards me and stopped
and slunk round me, growling, barked gruffly, and shortly and presently
became fog again.

My mind swayed back to the ancient beliefs and fears of our race.

My doubts and disbeliefs slipped from me like a loosely fitting garment.
I wondered quite simply what dogs bayed about the path of that other
walker in the darkness, what shapes, what lights, it might be, loomed
about him as he went his way from our last encounter on earth--along the
paths that are real, and the way that endures for ever?

IX

Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle's deathbed is my
aunt. When it was beyond all hope that my uncle could live I threw aside
whatever concealment remained to us and telegraphed directly to her.
But she came too late to see him living. She saw him calm and still,
strangely unlike his habitual garrulous animation, an unfamiliar
inflexibility.

"It isn't like him," she whispered, awed by this alien dignity.

I remember her chiefly as she talked and wept upon the bridge below the
old castle. We had got rid of some amateurish reporters from Biarritz,
and had walked together in the hot morning sunshine down through Port
Luzon. There, for a time, we stood leaning on the parapet of the bridge
and surveying the distant peeks, the rich blue masses of the Pyrenees.
For a long time we said nothing, and