DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough floor of the bungalow¹, before either of the men was conscious of the passage of time. Bernald, vaguely² trying to define his own state in retrospect³, could only phrase it: “I floated . . . floated. . . . ”

The gist⁴ of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily disappeared, causing the rumour⁵ of his death to be reported to an inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world had made of him.

“You’ll hardly believe it of me; I hardly believe it of myself; but I went away in a rage of disappointment, of wounded pride — no, vanity! I don’t know which cut deepest — the sneers⁶ or the silence — but between them, there wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t raw. I had just the one thing in me: the message, the cry, the revelation. But nobody saw and nobody listened. Nobody wanted what I had to give. I was like a poor devil of a tramp looking for shelter on a bitter night, in a town with every door bolted and all the windows dark. And suddenly I felt that the easiest thing would be to lie down and go to sleep in the snow. Perhaps I’d a vague notion that if they found me there at daylight, frozen stiff, the pathetic spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of remorse⁷. . . . So I took care to be found! Well, a good many thousand people die every day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered that I was simply one of the thousands; and when I made that discovery I really died — and stayed dead a year or two. . . . When I came to life again I was off on the under side of the world, in regions unaware⁸ of what we know as ‘the public.’ Have you any notion how it shifts the point of view to wake under new

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