tion of the body, which the Church promises, was to be
interpreted as the renewal of one's own personality in the coming
generations. Oh, there was something great, something indescribably
comforting in such a survival.

"Are you speculating about something?" asked his wife. She had
looked up from her easel for a moment.

"Eh? What? Did you say anything, darling?" The man started up in a
fright, as one who has been straying along forbidden paths.

She laughed at his absent-mindedness; it was getting worse and
worse. But what was he thinking of? Business?--surely not. But perhaps
he wanted to write a novel, a tale? Why should he not try his hand at
that for once in a way? That was something quite different from sending
short chatty accounts of one's journey to one of the papers. And of
course he would be able to do it. People who had not half the
education, not half the knowledge, not half the aesthetic refinement of
feeling he had wrote quite readable books.

She talked brightly and persuasively to him, but he shook his head
with a certain resignation: nonsense, neither novels nor any other kind
of writing. And he thought to himself: it is always said that a piece
of work is like a child--that is to say, only a truly great piece of
work, of course. Was the work he and his wife created work in that
sense? Work that would exist eternally? He suddenly found things to
censure severely in her picture, which he had politely admired only the
day before.

She got quite frightened about it. Why was he so irritable to-day?
Was he going to develop nerves at the finish? Yes, it was evident, the
warm air of the south did not suit him, he had lost his briskness,
looked so tired. There was nothing for it, her husband was more
to her than her picture, she would leave off her painting at once.

And that was what happened. They went away, travelled from one place
to another, from one hotel to another, along the lakes, over the
frontier, until they made a somewhat longer stay high up among the Alps
in Switzerland.

Instead of lying under a palm-tree he lay in the shadow of a
fir--now his wife was painting--and followed the movements of her brush
with his eyes over the top of his open book.

She was busily painting, for she had discovered a delightful
subject. That green alpine meadow, with its wealth of flowers as
variegated as they could possibly be and the backs of the brown cows
with the sun shining on them, was as full of ch