They went out, and walked for some distance in silence.  Hugh ventured to say at length: 

“You said you had spent the day strangely:  May I ask how?”

“In a condemned cell in Newgate,” answered Falconer.  “I am not in the habit of going to such places, but the man wanted to see me, and I went.”

As Falconer said no more, and as Hugh was afraid of showing anything like vulgar curiosity, this thread of conversation broke.  Nothing worth recording passed until they entered a narrow court in Somers Town.

“Are you afraid of infection?” Falconer said.

“Not in the least, if there be any reason for exposing myself to it.”

“That is right .—­ And I need not ask if you are in good health.”

“I am in perfect health.”

“Then I need not mind asking you to wait for me till I come out of this house.  There is typhus in it.”

“I will wait with pleasure.  I will go with you if I can be of any use.”

“There is no occasion.  It is not your business this time.”

So saying, Falconer opened the door, and walked in.

Said Hugh to himself:  “I must tell this man the whole story; and with it all my own.”

In a few minutes Falconer rejoined him, looking solemn, but with a kind of relieved expression on his face.

“The poor fellow is gone,” said he.

“Ah!”

“What a thing it must be, Mr. Sutherland, for a man to break out of the choke-damp of a typhus fever into the clear air of the life beyond!”

“Yes,” said Hugh; adding, after a slight hesitation, “if he be at all prepared for the change.”

“Where a change belongs to the natural order of things,” said Falconer, “and arrives inevitably at some hour, there must always be more or less preparedness for it.  Besides, I think a man is generally prepared for a breath of fresh air.”

Hugh did not reply, for he felt that he did not fully comprehend his new acquaintance.  But he had a strong suspicion that it was because he moved in a higher region than himself.

“If you will still accompany me,” resumed Falconer, who had not yet adverted to Hugh’s object in seeking his acquaintance, “you will, I think, be soon compelled to believe that, at whatever time death may arrive, or in whatever condition the man may be at the time, it comes as the best and only good that can at that moment reach him.  We are, perhaps, too much in the habit of thinking of death as the culmination of disease, which, regarded only in itself, is an evil, and a terrible evil.  But I think rather of death as the first pulse of the new strength, shaking itself free from the old mouldy remnants of earth-garments, that it may begin in freedom the new life that grows out of the old.  The caterpillar dies into the butterfly.  Who knows but disease may be the coming, the keener life, breaking into this, and beginning to destroy like fire the inferior modes or garments of the present?  And then disease would be but the sign of the salvation of fire; of the agony of the greater life to lift us to itself, out of that wherein we are failing and sinning.  And so we praise the consuming fire of life.”