A little path ran between hedge and barley, and along this, leisurely and content and glad, looking at this beautiful thing and that, moving a step and stopping, then moving on again, I came presently to a stile, and deep below it, and overgrown, was a lane.

And on the worn oak of the stile was a round label, and on the label these words, “Swindells’ G 90 Pills.”

I sat myself astraddle on the stile, not fully grasping all the implications of these words.  But they perplexed me even more than the revolver and my dirty cuff.

About me now the birds lifted up their little hearts and sang, ever more birds and more.

I read the label over and over again, and joined it to the fact that I still wore my former clothes, and that my revolver had been lying at my feet.  One conclusion stared out at me.  This was no new planet, no glorious hereafter such as I had supposed.  This beautiful wonderland was the world, the same old world of my rage and death!  But at least it was like meeting a familiar house-slut, washed and dignified, dressed in a queen’s robes, worshipful and fine. . . .

It might be the old world indeed, but something new lay upon all things, a glowing certitude of health and happiness.  It might be the old world, but the dust and fury of the old life was certainly done.  At least I had no doubt of that.

I recalled the last phases of my former life, that darkling climax of pursuit and anger and universal darkness and the whirling green vapors of extinction.  The comet had struck the earth and made an end to all things; of that too I was assured.

But afterward? . . .

And now?

The imaginations of my boyhood came back as speculative possibilities.  In those days I had believed firmly in the necessary advent of a last day, a great coming out of the sky, trumpetings and fear, the Resurrection, and the Judgment.  My roving fancy now suggested to me that this Judgment must have come and passed.  That it had passed and in some manner missed me.  I was left alone here, in a swept and garnished world (except, of course, for this label of Swindells’) to begin again perhaps. . . .

No doubt Swindells has got his deserts.

My mind ran for a time on Swindells, on the imbecile pushfulness of that extinct creature, dealing in rubbish, covering the country-side with lies in order to get—­what had he sought?—­a silly, ugly, great house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of his life, perhaps.  You cannot imagine the littleness of those former times; their naive, queer absurdities!  And for the first time in my existence I thought of these things without bitterness.  In the former days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the extraordinary foolishness of the old life.  The ludicrous side of human wealth and importance