"You know it for a fact?"
"Yes."
"Since when?"
"A month or so."
"They told you?"
"No. They still keep up the fiction that they can't predict anything with any surety."
"Then how do you know?"
"How does anybody know it, when more than half of himself is just so much dead matter; when the division line between the dead part and the alive doesn't move along by so much as one hair's breadth; when the dead part is dead past any resurrection? It is my body, Whittenden. I know it for a fact."
There was no especial answer to be made. Whittenden had the superlative good sense to attempt none. After a silence, Reed spoke again.
"I haven't told anybody of it yet, till now. There was no use, and I dreaded the row they'd be sure to make. Besides, I wanted to tell you, first of all, because you are the one man in reach who has seen me in the thick of things, and I knew there would be any amount of detail you would take in, without my having to explain it to you."