“There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don’t like it.  If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent.  If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.  It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy.  It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour’s goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods.  It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.  If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a song—­ at least, not a comic song.”

“Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies.  I am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed itself.  Speaking singly, I feel as if man was tied to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and doubt.  But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this is the way out.  If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.  Barely and brutally to be good—­that may be the road, and he may have found it.  Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of my old friend Moses.  Mr. Gould does not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.”

“No,” said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; “I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.”

“Well,” said Michael quietly, “will you tell me one thing?  Which of us has ever tried it?”

A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological epoch which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type; for there rose at last in the stillness a massive figure that the other men had almost completely forgotten.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Dr. Warner cheerfully, “I’ve been pretty well entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery for a couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin, and I’m engaged for a city dinner.  Among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be allowed to shoot me in the back garden.”

He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly to the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still followed him:  “But really the bullet missed you by several feet.”  And another voice added:  “The bullet missed him by several years.”

There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
Moon said suddenly, “We have been sitting with a ghost. 
Dr. Herbert Warner died years ago.”