“When did you tell me?”

“That day I danced for you.”

“Yes, I remember that. I try to remember everything — I try and I try — but I can’t think what really happened. Perhaps nobody knows what happened.” And then suddenly he said: “Leni — did you — you didn’t — you didn’t — do anything — did you?”

She looked at him gravely for a moment and then answered: “No. Did you?”

“I didn’t either. Did you think I did?”

“I wondered.”

“I wondered too.” Then he smiled. “Forgive me. How could such a suspicion —”

“But if it’s really true that neither of us —”

“Yes?”

“Then who?”

“Yes, that’s the trouble. That’s why they won’t believe us. They have to find some answer. They have to blame somebody. And it’s so easy to prove things by evidence.”

She put up her hand and touched his face as a blind person memorizes. “They are going to kill us, David, though we haven’t done any wrong at all.”

“I know.” And he added, seeing beyond her, hundreds of miles beyond her: “We are not alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“These things are always happening. Don’t be afraid of death. It isn’t the worst we have to face — only the last.”

“But that is why it is the worst.”

“No, no, we should fear birth far more if we could look ahead to it.” And then, half-impishly, he began to improvise on the theme, to play with the idea for her comfort and his own. “Oh, much more, I assure you. I’ve often thought that. Suppose, just for argument, that everything did happen the other way round. Suppose people gathered in a churchyard and hauled you from a hole in the ground in a wooden box and took you back to a house, and after a day or so the box was opened and you were laid on a bed, and a few days later people gathered at the bedside and all at once the breath of life came into you, bringing agony first of all, then less and less till you could actually stir and creep about, walking with a stick perhaps and being for a time a bit deaf and blind and crazy …”

“Horrible!”

“But not nearly as horrible as when you come to the other end. For think of the day you’d leave school and begin to stay at home in the nursery. Think of the first time you’d really believe in Santa Claus and hang up your stocking on Christmas Eve! Think of people patting you on the head as you grew younger every day, as you gradually lost speech and height and weight and personality! That last stumbling walk across the hearthrug before you settled down to pram life! How unutterably tragic — far more so than growing old and dying!”

“But — never — never — to see you again!”

“Maybe you will. If there’s a next world I’ll try to find you in it as I found you in this. There will be other worlds, surely, or maybe this world over again … worlds in which the things we have won’t be wasted like this … I’ll find you … do you remember that first night I did find you? Very windy — later on it rained. First of all I went to the theatre, and you’d gone. But I found you in the end.”