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DON-A-DREAMS

volume, he felt lonely. He missed his cousin from the room.

He rose from his chair and began to pace up and down with a frightened restlessness. He halted, staring at the cheerful glow of his "student" lamp, and finding it, in some strange way, a tragically small light in the vast darkness of the night. He turned with a quiver, struck cold again by the thought that was crouching, like a terror, in his brain. If it were true that death——?

Suddenly, he smiled—the ghastly smile of a man trying to deride his fear. It was impossible that all this immense activity of civilization—all this labour and art and learning, all this doing and suffering, all this loving and nobility, praying and aspiring of man—was the chattering business of a world of untailed apes. God would not——

His smile set on his mouth in a fixed grimace in which there was no mirth. His eyes slowly narrowed and shut as if he had been stricken with a pain in the temples. He jerked back his head, and threw his hands up to his face.

When the stroke had passed, he was on his knees beside his bed, praying—praying with the fervour of a condemned man who has suddenly realized the whole meaning of the sentence of death, praying with the increasing feverishness of doubt, praying against the thought that his prayers were addressed to the deaf heaven of Science that is hung with barren stars and the cold night of endless emptiness. He stopped and looked up, his jaw fallen, as if listening to the