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“Yes.”

“And there, if I may say so, you are a little unjust. It isn’t my fault that I was born weak.”

“But a man may conquer his weakness.”

“Yes, if he is endowed with the strength for that.”

His fatalism drew from me a gesture of disgust.

“Do you really mean,” I asked, “that because you didn’t pull that cord, you COULDN’T have pulled it?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s written in your hands that you couldn’t?”

He looked at the palms of his hands.

“They are the hands of a very weak man,” he said.

“A man so weak that he cannot believe in the possibility of free will for himself or for any one?”

“They are the hands of an intelligent man, who can weigh evidence and see things as they are.”

“But answer me: Was it foreordained that you should not pull that cord?”

“It was foreordained.”

“And was it actually marked in your hands that you were not going to pull it?”

“Ah, well, you see, it is rather the things one IS going to do that are actually marked. The things one isn’t going to do,–the innumerable negative things,–how could one expect THEM to be marked?”

“But the consequences of what one leaves undone may be positive?”

“Horribly positive. My hand is the hand of a man who has suffered a great deal in later life.”

“And was it the hand of a man DESTINED to suffer?”

“Oh, yes. I thought I told you that.”

There was a pause.

“Well,” I said, with awkward sympathy, “I suppose all hands are the hands of people destined to suffer.”

“Not of people destined to suffer so much as I have suffered–as I still suffer.”

The insistence of his self-pity chilled me, and I harked back to a question he had not straightly answered.

“Tell me: Was it marked in your hands that you were not going to pull that cord?”

Again he looked at his hands, and then, having pressed them for a moment to his face, “It was marked very clearly,” he answered, “in THEIR hands.”

Two or three days after this colloquy there had occurred to me in London an idea–an ingenious and comfortable doubt. How was Laider to be sure that his brain, recovering from concussion, had REMEMBERED what happened in the course of that railway-journey? How was he to know that his brain hadn’t simply, in its abeyance, INVENTED all this for him? It might be that he had never seen those signs in those hands. Assuredly, here was a bright loophole. I had forthwith written to Laider, pointing it out.

This was the letter which now, at my second visit, I had found miserably pent on the letter-board. I remembered my promise to rescue it. I arose from the retaining fireside, stretched my arms, yawned, and went forth to fulfil my Christian purpose. There was no one in the hall. The “shower” had at length ceased. The sun had positively come out, and the front door had been thrown open in its honor. Everything along the sea-front was beautifully gleaming, drying, shimmering. But I was not to be diverted from my purpose. I went to the letter-board. And–my letter was not there! Resourceful and plucky little thing–it had escaped! I did hope it would not be captured and brought back. Perhaps the alarm had already been raised by the tolling of that great bell which warns the inhabitants for miles around that a letter has broken loose from the letter-board. I had a vision of my envelop skimming wildly along the coast-line, pursued by the old, but active, waiter and a breathless pack of local worthies. I saw it outdistancing them all, dodging past coast-guards, doubling on its tracks, leaping breakwaters, unluckily injuring itself, losing speed, and at last, in a splendor of desperation, taking to the open sea. But suddenly I had another idea. Perhaps Laider had returned?