nd little waves leaped on the
shore. He smiled as if getting a friend's morning salute, and began to
talk aloud.

"I have brought you another unfortunate," he said, "and I am going to
read his thoughts to you."

He opened the book and very tenderly, as if reciting a funeral service,
murmured the words of the soliloquy on suicide. How solemnly sounded in
that solitude the fateful phrase "but that the dread of something after
death!" That was indeed the rub! After death there can be anything; and
were it little and slender as a spider's web, it might be too much for
the sleep that is supposed to know no waking and no dreams. After all,
he thought, how much are men alike; for the quandary of Hamlet is mine;
I know not what to do. He laid aside the book and gave himself to idle
watching of the pool. A bird dipped his wing into it midway, and set a
circle of wavelets tripping to the shore. One by one they died among the
sedges, and there was no trace of them more.

"That is the thing for which I am looking," he said; "disappearance
without consequences ... just to fade away as if into water or air ...
to separate on the spot into original elements ... to be no more what I
am, either to myself or others ... then no inquest, no search, no
funeral, no tears ... nothing. And after such a death, perhaps,
something might renew the personality in conditions so far from these,
so different, that _now_ and _then_ would never come into contact."

He sighed. What a disappearance that would be. And at that moment the
words of the Monsignor came back to him:

"_If at any time you wish to disappear, command me._"

A thrill leaped through his dead veins, as of one rising from the dead,
but he lay motionless observing the pool. Before him passed the details
of that night at the tavern; the portraits, the chirping cricket, the
vines at the window, the strange theory of the priest about
disappearing. He reviewed that theory as a judge might review a case, so
he thought; but in fact his mind was swinging at headlong speed over the
possibilities, and his pulses were bounding. It was possible, even in
this world, to disappear more thoroughly behind the veil of life than
under the veil of death. If one only had the will!

He rose brimming with exultant joy. An intoxication seized him that
lifted him at once over all his sorrow, and placed him almost in that
very spot wherein he stood ten days ago; gay, debonair, light of heart
as a boy, u