“That's because you've drunk too much—or not enough.
“'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling—'”
“My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts.”
“For an agnostic that seems a bit—”
“Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts—no—no things which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done—”
“Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'”
Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and there was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed away the moist hair from his haggard face—that face which would look like the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.
“'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'” he murmured drowsily, “'it is some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night—'”
The words floated off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arose preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent over his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.
“Damned by the skin of his teeth!” he muttered. “A little more, and he would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As it is”—he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy—“he is merely one of those splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell.” Then Dodson had a momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and stretching himself on his sofa, he, too, slept.