Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/386

“I am dying,” answered the other quite calmly. “I am in the quite literal sense of the words dying to know something. I want to know what all this can possibly mean.”

MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: “You are still thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is incredible. She’s not the only person here. I’ve met that fellow Wilkinson, whose yacht we lost. I’ve met the very magistrate you were hauled up to when you broke my window. What can it mean—meeting all these old people again? One never meets such old friends again except in a dream.”

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: “Are you really there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply dreaming?”

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word, and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

“No, you good atheist,” he cried; “no, you clean, courteous, reverent, pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming—you are waking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are two states where one meets so