"Not here," she answered, with a sad smile. "They died in one year. My father was the victim of a violent fever which devastated our town: my mother grieved herself into the grave a few months later. It had been a perfect union; they were mental comrades, spiritual affinities, physical mates. They could not exist apart. It was better that she joined him so soon." "It left you very much alone?" Percy spoke softly, scarcely knowing what to say in presence of such a bereavement. "Yes, and no," she answered. "If I had believed they were lying in the earth waiting the Judgment Day, scores, thousands or millions of years hence, I should have been crazed with my desolation. But my faith was so comforting to me, however unorthodox, that I have found strength and happiness in it." "Tell me what it is?" urged Percy, earnestly, almost eagerly. "These subjects interest and fascinate me. Long ago, my intellect rejected old dogmas. Yet I find it difficult to know what to believe. The worn out creeds insult my intelligence. The liberal teachers of the day shock me with their irreverence, and leave my soul hungry: and in Spiritualism I find so much trickery, fraud, and immorality, mixed up with a few mysterious and unsatisfactory truths, that I am again in despair." "But you must not be in despair," Helena said, with one of her beautiful smiles. "You have not looked at Spiritualism from the right standpoint. So long as you seek its truths through professional mediums, you will be dissatisfied and confused." "Then you think they are all humbugs?" "Certainly not:" Helena replied, with emphasis. "There are people endowed with the gift of divination, beyond doubt. There are peculiarly organized beings who can read the future and the past--beings who see through and beyond this thin veil of mortality, into the spiritual realms which lie very close to us. But we must not look to those people for our enlightenment upon this subject. If we do, we soon lose our individuality; we grow dependent and unpractical and visionary. God placed us here to carve out our own destinies--to work and wait for events, not to tear aside the curtain and read the cypher which is understood by a few." "But how, then, can I obtain the benefits you mention from this belief?" questioned Percy. "You must look to the development of your own spiritual nature, and to the consequent crucifying of your baser self, in order to obtain the comfort and benefit of this belief. In this you will have the help of your departed friends." "You think they retain their interest in and love for us, the same there as here?" "Oh, yes, assuredly. Yet often our sorrows seem, to their enlarged vision, as the sorrows of children over broken toys seem to us; yet they strive to comfort us."