But Courtland began to speak, and we leaned forward, intent, knowing that he must understand. Yet his first words were a confession of doubt, of that same inability to pierce the depths of the thing and pass sentence which exasperated us all vaguely.
"I don't know if I understand—yet," he began, slowly. "I've stared and stared at it—and yet—I don't know. Sometimes I think I understand—a little more every day—and yet"
His voice had droned off gradually. A heavy torpor descended from the low sky. Far out lights flared up, red, dishevelled lights that bounded and leaped, up and down, to and fro, in frenzied dance. The Tagal fishermen were calling the fish with their alluring flames; the soft, insistent tapping of their paddles upon the flanks of their canoes came to our ears like hypnotic suggestion. They began to shout, a mad medley of yells that wavered, broke, began again and at last welded in one long, quavering cry full of incomprehensible desolation.
And Courtland's voice bassed forth again, with unexpected steadiness.
"It isn't the fall of him that's difficult; that's easy, too easy—we see so much of it. But the redemption—unless we go back to the old explanation, puerile to us complicated moderns, perhaps from its very obviousness—the old theory of purification through
