"There's a trunk to follow; Williams is to pack what I need.... Good-bye, Billy. I wouldn't go if I didn't have to."
Portlaw took his offered hand as though dazed.
"You'll come back, of course," he said, "in a couple of days—or a week if you like—but you'll be back, of course. You know if there's anything the matter with your salary just say so. I always meant you should feel perfectly free to fix your salary to suit yourself. Only be sure to come back in a week, won't you?"
"Good-bye," said Malcourt in a low voice. "I'd like to talk to Hamil—if he can give me a few moments."
Bareheaded, Hamil stepped out into the clear, crisp, April sunshine where the buckboard stood on the gravel.
The strong outdoor light emphasized Malcourt's excessive pallor, and the hand he offered Hamil was icy. Then his nervous grasp relaxed; he drew on his dog-pelt driving gloves and buttoned the fur coat to the throat.
"I want you—to—to remember—remember that I always liked you," he said with an effort, in curious contrast to his habitual fluency. "You won't believe it—some day. But it is true.... Perhaps I'll prove it, yet.... My father used to say that everything except death had been proven; and there remained, therefore, only one event of any sporting interest to the world.... He was a very interesting man—my father. He did not believe in death.... And I do not.... This sloughing off of the material integument seems to me purely a matter of the mechanical routine of evolution, a natural process in further and inevitable development, not a finality to individualism!... Fertilisation, gestation, the hatching, growth, the episodic deliverance from encasing matter which is called death, seem to me only the first few basic steps in the sequences of an endless metamorphosis.... My father thought so. His was a very fine mind—is a finer mind still.... Will you understand me if I say that we often communicate with each other—my father and I?"
"Communicate?" repeated Hamil.
"Often."
Hamil said slowly: "I don't think I understand."