‘Let us see what the artist has added to the picture since yesterday,’ said Matthew, signing to me to hand him the mirror.

‘H’m,’ he murmured, ’he’s had one of his lazy days, I’m afraid.  He’s hardly added a touch—­just a little heightened the chiaroscuro, sharpened the nose a trifle, deepened some little the shadows round the eyes....

‘O why,’ he presently sighed, ’does he not work a little overtime and get it done?  He’s been paid handsomely enough....

‘Paid,’ he continued, ’by a life that is so much undeveloped gold-mine, paid by all my uncashed hopes and dreams....’

‘He works fast enough for me, old fellow,’ I interrupted; ’there was a time, was there not, when he worked too fast for you and me?’

There are moments, for certain people, when such fantastic unreality as this is the truest realism.  Matthew and I talked like this with our brains, because we hadn’t the courage to allow our hearts to break in upon the conversation.  Had I dared to say some real emotional thing, what effect would it have had but to set poor tired Matthew a-coughing? and it was our aim that he should die with as little to-do as practicable.  The emotional in such situations is merely the obvious.  There was no need for either of us to state the elementary feelings of our love.  I knew that Matthew was going to die, and he knew that—­I was going to live, and we pitied each other accordingly; though I confess my feeling for him was rather one of envy,—­when it was not congratulation.

Thus, to tell the truth, we never mentioned ‘the hereafter.’  I don’t believe it even occurred to us.  Indeed, we spent the few hours that remained of our friendship in retailing the latest gathered of those good stories with which we had been accustomed to salt our intercourse.

One of Matthew’s anecdotes was, no doubt, somewhat suggested by the occasion, and I should add that he had always somewhat of an ecclesiastical bias—­would, I believe, have ended some day as a Monsignor, a notable ‘Bishop Blougram.’

His story was of an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire.  ’You know the Black Country, my friends,’ he had declaimed,’ you have seen it, at night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!), snatch a precarious existence—­you have seen them silhouetted against the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in the very jaws of the awful fire.  Have you realised that the burdens with which they thus run hither and thither are molten iron, iron to which such a stupendous heat has been applied that it has melted, melted as though it had been sugar in the sun?—­well! returning to hell-fire, let me tell you this, that in hell they eat this fiery molten metal for ice-cream!—­yes! and are glad to get anything so cool.’