Féraz ceased playing and looked at him.
“What is it?” he asked anxiously.
“Nothing!” replied his brother in a tranquil voice—“What should there be? Only the poem is very beautiful, and out of the common,—though, to me, terribly suggestive of—a mistake somewhere in creation. Love to the Saved—Love to the Lost!—naturally it would have different aspects,—but it is an anomaly—Love, to be true to its name, should have no ‘lost’ ones in its chronicle.”
Féraz was silent.
“Do you believe”—continued El-Râmi—“that there is a ‘nethermost Hell’?—a place or a state of mind resembling that ‘rock ’mid the sulphurous surges’?”
“I should imagine,” replied Féraz with some diffidence, “that there must be a condition in which we are bound to look back and see where we were wrong,—a condition, too, in which we have time to be sorry——”
“Unfair and unreasonable!” exclaimed his brother hotly. “For, suppose we did not know we were wrong? We are left absolutely without guidance in this world to do as we like.”
“I do not think you can quite say that”—remonstrated Féraz gently—“We do know when we are wrong—generally; some instinct tells us so—and, while we have the book of Nature, we are not left without guidance. As for looking back and seeing our former mistakes, I think that is unquestionable,—for as I grow older I begin to see where I failed in my former life, and how I deserved to lose my star-kingdom.”
El-Râmi looked impatient.
“You are a dreamer”—he said decisively—“and your star-kingdom is a dream also. You cannot tell me truthfully that you remember anything of a former existence?”