pieces cut out
from the spangled fabric of a starry sky. A ripple of pearly light
wavered over them, like the reflection of the unseen river mirrored
for the Lady of Shalott.

It was a strange, living light, beating with a visible pulse, and it
slowly grew until its white radiance had extinguished the individual
lamps of the stars. Waterfalls flashed out of darkness, like white,
laughing nymphs flinging off black masks and dominoes; silver goblets
and diamond necklaces were flung into the river bed, and vanished
forever with a mystic gleam.

"If there's a heaven, can there be anything in it better than this,
Little Pal?" I asked.

"There can be God," he said. "I'm a pagan sometimes in the sun, but
never on a night like this. Then one _knows_ things one isn't sure of
at other times. Why, I suppose there isn't really a world at all! God
is simply thinking of these things, and of us, so we and they seem to
be. We are his thoughts; the mountains, and the river, and the
wild-flowers are his thoughts. It's just as if an author writes a
story. In the story, all the people and the things which concern them
are real, but you close the volume and they simply don't exist. Only
God doesn't close the volume, I think, until the next is ready."

"I wonder whether we'll both come into the next story?"

"Who knows? Perhaps you'll wander into one story, and I'll get lost in
another."

A certain sadness fell upon me, born partly of our talk, partly of the
poignant beauty of the night. We came to the Cantine de Proz, fast
asleep in its lonely valley, and so we went on and on, our souls tuned
to music and poetry by the song of the stars and the beauty of the
night: But slowly a change stole over us. For a long time I was only
dimly conscious of it, in a puzzled way, in myself. Why was it that my
spirit stood no longer on the heights? Why did the moonlight look cold
and metallic? Why had the rushing sound of the river got on my nerves,
like the monotonous crying of a fretful child? Why did our frequent
silences no longer tingle with a meaning which there was no need to
express in words? Why was my brain empty of impressions as a squeezed
sponge of water? Why, in fact, though everything was outwardly the
same, why was all in reality different?

"Oh, Man, I'm so hungry!" sighed Boy.

"By Jove, that's what's been the matter with me this last half-hour,
and I didn't know it!" said I.

"I feel as if I could form a hollow square, all b