From the distance came the barking of a dog.

Bittacy, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that had caught all three.

“It’s rather a comforting thought,” he said, throwing the match out of the window, “that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic.”

“The universe, yes,” said Sanderson, “is all one, really. We’re puzzled by the gaps we cannot see across, but as a fact, I suppose, there are no gaps at all.”

Mrs. Bittacy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.

“In trees and plants especially, there dreams an exquisite life that no one yet has proved unconscious.”

“Or conscious either, Mr. Sanderson,” she neatly interjected. “It’s only man that was made after His image, not shrubberies and things… .”

Her husband interposed without delay.

“It is not necessary,” he explained suavely, “to say that they’re alive in the sense that we are alive. At the same time,” with an eye to his wife, “I see no harm in holding, dear, that all created things contain some measure of His life Who made them. It’s only beautiful to hold that He created nothing dead. We are not pantheists for all that!” he added soothingly.

“Oh, no! Not that, I hope!” The word alarmed her. It was worse than pope. Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing … like a panther.

“I like to think that even in decay there’s life,” the painter murmured. “The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency; there’s force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed. And take an inert stone: it’s crammed with heat and weight and potencies of all sorts. What holds its particles together indeed? We understand it as little as gravity or why a needle always turns to the ‘North.’ Both things may be a mode of life… .”

“You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson?” exclaimed the lady with a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage even more plainly than her tone. The artist smiled to himself I the darkness, but it was Bittacy who hastened to reply.

“Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies,” he said quietly, “may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the worlds spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these things follow the law of their being explains nothing. Mr. Sanderson merely suggests—poetically, my dear, of course—that these may be manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours.”

“The ‘breath of life,’ we read, ‘He breathed into them.’ These things do not breathe.” She said it with triumph.

Then Sanderson put in a word. But he spoke rather to himself or to his host than by way of serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady.

“But plants do breathe too, you know,” he said.