"You'll have no option. Of course I must come! Didn't I tell you the other day that we're bound up together? My destiny is in your hands. I must never leave you. I had an idea the end would have come here, but it seems I'm mistaken."
"I wish you'd be a little more explicit sometimes."
"It would probably amuse you if I were, and though I'm not the sort of man who fears ridicule, as a general rule, I could not bear to have you laugh at this."
"I should not laugh; it seems to me I shall never laugh again. Tell me, Murkard, what you mean."
"I will tell you."
He rose and walked up and down the little room for some minutes. Then he stopped, and leaning against the smoke-coloured mantelpiece, spoke.
"In the first place, I suppose you will admit that there are some men in this extraordinary world of ours more delicately constructed than others. You agree to that. Very good. Well, that being so, I am perhaps more sensitive than you—possibly, though I don't say absolutely, accounted for by my deformity. I look at commonplace things in a different way; my brain receives different impressions from passing events. I don't say whether my impressions are right or wrong. At any rate, they are there. Directly I set eyes on you, that first night of our meeting, I knew you were my fate. Don't ask me how I knew it. It is sufficient that I did know it. Something inside here seemed to tell me that our lives were bound up together; in fact, that you were the man for whose sake I was sent into the world. You remember we were starving at the time, and that we slept under a Moreton Bay fig in the Domain. Well, perhaps as the result of that hunger, I dreamed a dream. Something came to me and bade me to go with you, bade me be by your side continually because I was necessary to your life, and because my death would be by your hands."
"Good gracious, Murkard, think what you're saying!"
"I have thought, and I know. I don't mean that you will murder me, but I do mean that it will be in connection with you that I shall meet my death. The same dream told me that a chance would be given us. That chance has come. Also the dream told me that my only hope of heaven lay in saving you by laying down my own life. That time has not come yet—but it will come as surely as we are now located in this hut. In the meantime there is another life between us. That life we have not met yet; what or whose it is I have no notion, but I dread it night and day."
"You don't mean to tell me you believe all that you're telling me?"