Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/361

 and the little beast rolled over dead. He took it up, and looked at it curiously. He smoothed with his fingers its warm, velvety coat. He was sorry he had killed it. A second ago it had been enjoying the sunshine, the warm air, its own sense of well-being. And now it was utterly destroyed, utterly annihilated, and no one could restore to it the life which he had wantonly taken.

The thought of Shergold, always present at the back of his mind, pressed forward imperatively. Shergold had not believed in soul or immortality. He had believed that with death the life of a man comes to an end, just as does the life of a mouse. Le Mesurier had often listened, perforce, to his dogmatising on such views to Lily; to his proclaiming that each individual life is but a flash of light between two eternities of darkness; that just as the body returns to the elements from which it came, so the spirit is reabsorbed into the forces and energies which move the world. And because Shergold had no belief in another life, he had set an immense value upon this one. In his self-engrossed, pedantic way, he had thoroughly enjoyed every hour, every moment of it. Supposing his views were true, then the greatest injury one could inflict on such a man would be to deprive him of this life which he prized, suddenly to extinguish him like a candle, to annihilate him like this poor little mole.

He laid the body of the mole down upon the turf, and walked away. He no longer sang or whistled to himself. The monotonous days seemed intolerably long.

Three months had gone by. Le Mesurier, in the solitude of Le Tas, had suffered every pang a guilty conscience can inflict, had been through every phase of remorse and of despair.

The