Then for ten minutes he was very still.  Then he gave an uneasy movement, and half raised himself.

“He is going,” said the doctor.

Suddenly he opened his eyes.  “All three,” he said.  They were his last words.  The curate began to say a prayer; we none of us interrupted him.  There was a convulsive movement, and all was over.  The doctor went out.  We cried like children by the bed.

RECAPITULATION

I had rather intended to say no more; to let the Life speak for itself.  I had imagined that a moral destroyed, rather than enhanced, the effect of a story; that a descriptive catalogue rather interfered with one’s appreciation of a picture than otherwise; but a friend to whom I showed my little collection, and to whose opinion I greatly defer, expressed surprise at the abruptness of the close.  “You seem to leave the end,” he said, “tangled and unravelled; one wants the threads just gathered together again.”  So I will try and discharge this task.

The difficulty is not to arrive at a deterministic theory of life for most men.  Anyone who will take things as he finds them, and fairly come to a conclusion about them, not hampered by fetters of authority or tradition, but independently arriving at his own solution, must inevitably arrive at this; there is no logical escape.  But the difficulty lies in the application of this determinism to life.  So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy.  The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system; nothing good can come out of it in practice.

The writer is one of those who believe that truth, however painful, is essentially practical.  That truth when seen must be applied, must be worked out into life, is his cherished idea.  But he, as much as anyone, has felt the usual (alas!) and bitter consequences of determinism; has seen the victim of the thought sit, as it were, with his hands tied; has seen the determinist sink into temporary fatalism, and has seen effort relaxed and ideals growing hourly dim.

He was beginning to suffer in this manner himself when, at Cambridge, he met Arthur; and met in him not only an inspiring acquaintance, an encouraging friend, but a man who was far ahead of him on the same path where he had only ventured to imprint a few trembling footsteps, and then draw back appalled at the sombre prospect.  Arthur was like one further up the pass, who had turned a corner, so to speak, and saw the road plain.