“Hereafter—­hereafter—­hereafter.”  As Dale moved away slowly, the dead man seemed to mock him, to laugh at him derisively.  “Hereafter—­yes, that’s a big word.  Yes, go and talk that out with God.”

He went up one of the narrow tracks that led toward the dead man’s Orphanage, intending to look at it and perhaps hear again the evening hymn; but before he got to those broken fences he turned and began to wander aimlessly through the trees.  All his mind was now full of the awful thought of God, and of the eternal punishment to which he believed God had condemned him.

Christ had tried to save him; but the other two persons of the Holy Blessed and Glorious Trinity had interposed, had prevented Christ from holding any further communication with him, and together had issued the fearful decree.  That was it.  Christ had not deserted him; he had lost the right ever to approach Christ again.  That accounted for everything—­the unutterable desolation, the dark despair, the overwhelming necessity of death without one ray of hope.

All that lovely and comforting faith in the endless loving mercy of God the Son, the Redeemer of mankind, the Friend and sometime Comrade of man, was to prove useless to him; the gentle creed of the Baptists could not be applied to so vile a case as his; he was at handygrips with the dread Jehovah, the mighty Judge, the offended King of creation.

Three Persons and one God—­yes, but such different Persons; and thinking of the triple mystery, he imagined that two of its component parts had probably seen through him from the very beginning of his religious fervor.  Only the other part, the part that he wished was the whole, had believed in him and gone on believing in him until it was forbidden to do so any more.

The awe and reverence that he felt while he thought in this manner made him bow his head and keep his eyes humbly downcast, as one not daring to look upward to the heavenly throne; yet, profound and sincere as was his reverential awe, he unhesitatingly translated all the sublime mystery of the skies into the simple terms that alone possess plain meaning to man’s limited intelligence.  Nothing in the naturally courageous bent of his mind prevented him; everything in his experiences of the Baptists, with their constant habit of homely illustration, encouraged him to do so.

He imagined the First and the Third Persons of the Trinity seated royally but vaguely amid the clouds, all about them a splendor of light like that of sunset or dawn, melodious music faintly perceptible, exquisitely beautiful forms of angels rising on white wings, hovering obediently, fading obediently—­but they themselves, the Lords of Life and of Death, the Masters of Time and Space, were two tangible concrete old men—­two venerable wise old men—­the ultimate strained extended conception of two powerful, honored, high-placed old men.  And they talked as men would talk—­not in the human vocabulary, but conveying to each other, somehow, human ideas—­about the man William Dale.