ternately, are only the two eyes of one vast
and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose
the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose
Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by
walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things,
laugh at them."

"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give
the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at
you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up
straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for
the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a
literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible
a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the
seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch
garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a
temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"

The sky close about the crests of the hills and trees was beginning to
turn from black to grey, with a random suggestion of the morning. The
slight figure seemed to crawl towards the larger one, and the voice
was more human.

"But suppose, friend," it said, "suppose that, in a bitterer and more
real sense, it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from
the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense
that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility,
of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a
joke."

The tall figure answered--

"He could not know it. For it was not all a joke."

And a gust of wind blew away some clouds that sealed the sky-line, and
showed a strip of silver behind his great dark legs. Then the other
voice came, having crept nearer still.

[Illustration: "WAYNE, IT WAS ALL A JOKE."]

"Adam Wayne," it said, "there are men who confess only in _articulo
mortis_; there are people who blame themselves only when they can no
longer help others. I am one of them. Here, upon the field of the
bloody end of it all, I come to tell you plainly what you would never
understand before. Do you know who I am?"

"I know you, Auberon Quin," answered the tall figure, "and I shall be
glad to unburden your spirit of anything that lies upon it."

"Adam Wayne," said the other voice, "of what I have to say you cannot
in common reason be glad to unburden me. Wayne,