"Greater than the sin!" was the reply. "It may be that, being his sister, I judge her harshly; but if yours is the most awful crime which your sex can commit against womanhood, then it seems to me that hers--a like breach of trust--is the blackest sin which a woman can commit against a man. Nor can it be said of hers that it was the deed of a moment--a moment of over-mastering passion, for it was deliberate and cruel. I say that that woman killed my brother!" she cried fiercely; "killed him body and soul, and sent him away heart-broken, and bereft of faith in womanhood and in God. And to gratify what? her vanity--a passion as selfish and hateful, if less brutal, than your own. You have recognised the loathsomeness of your act; but she, God help her! thinks of nothing but herself, and while she so thinks, heaven itself would be but hell to her, and in all hell there is as yet for her no hope of heaven." [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XI. _THE MYSTERY OF "THE DEAD WHO DIE."_ "Of all these mysteries there is none which fills me with such abject horror and dread as the mystery of 'the dead who die.'" "Through many days they toil; then comes a day They die not,--never having lived,--but cease; And round their narrow lips the mould falls close." _Rossetti_--"The Choice." It may occur to those of my readers who have neglected to bear in mind the concluding words of Chapter VIII., that notwithstanding the remorse which I have pictured myself as suffering in Hades, I do not appear to have been altogether indifferent to the consolations of social intercourse, and that existence in the Unseen, as represented in the pages of this diary, would seem to consist largely of conversation between the "spirits in prison." But because I have confined myself in my last three chapters to the relation of such facts in regard to the condition of others, as, either through observation or conversation, came to my knowledge in the course of my singular experiences, it must not be supposed that my own sufferings had in any way ceased. What those sufferings were as described by me in my sixth chapter, they continued to be during the whole of the time in which it was ordained that I should remain in Hades, and each of the conversations here recorded took place during that comparatively painless interval of which I have elsewhere spoken, and was separated from the conversation preceding or following it by a space of terrible pain. With which necessary reminder I pass on to tell of "the dead who die."