David did not answer her for a moment. “When I think of it,” he said at last, “it brings me not so much sadness as a strange feeling of mystery. Only stop, and think of what that vanished springtime meant--think that it was a presence of living, feeling, growing creatures,--infinite, unthinkable masses of them, robing all the world; and that now the life and the glory of it all is suddenly gone back into nothingness, that it was all but a fleeting vision, a phantom presence on the earth. I never realize that without coming to think of all the other things of life, and that they too are no more real than the springtime flowers; and so it makes me feel as if I were walking upon air, and living in a dream.” Helen was leaning against a post of the piazza, her eyes fixed upon David intently. “Does that not give a new meaning to the vanished spring-time?” he asked her; and she replied in a wondering whisper, “Yes,” and then gazed at him for a long time. “David,” she said at last, “it is fearful to think of a thing like that. What does it all mean? What causes it?” “Men have been asking that helpless question since the dawn of time,” he answered, “we only know what we see, this whirling and weaving of shadows, with its sacred facts of beauty and love.” Helen looked at him thoughtfully a moment, and then, recollecting something she had heard from her father, she said, “But, David, if God be a mystery like that, how can there be any religion?” “What we may fancy God to be makes no difference,” he answered. “That which we know is always the same, we have always the love and always the beauty. All men's religion is but the assertion that the source of these sacred things must be infinitely sacred, and that whatever may happen to us, that source can suffer no harm; that we live by a power stronger than ourselves, and that has no need of us.” Helen was looking at her husband anxiously; then suddenly she asked him, “But tell me then, David; you do not believe in heaven? You do not believe that our souls are immortal?” As he answered her in the negative she gave a slight start, and knitted her brows; and after another pause she demanded, “You do not believe in revealed religion then?”