But in Aeria this was not possible. The firm belief, ingrained into the very being of all who had reached the age of thought, that where men left off here, whether in good or evil, they would begin their lives again hereafter, precluded even the thought of such a lapse into social anarchy and individual sin. For, happily for them, the union of true religion with true philosophy had now been accomplished in a national faith, and the result was that even the terrors of the universal end which was so near failed to shake the fortitude that was founded on a basis firmer than that of the world itself. Though every home in the valley had its tragedy that night, a tragedy too sacred in its unspeakable solemnity for any mere words to describe it, when the next morning came the first bitterness of death had already passed. Saving only the little children, who, too young to understand, laughed and played and sang in the sunlight as usual, in happy unconsciousness of their coming fate, the dwellers in Aeria rose with the next sunrise from their sleepless couches and went about their daily associations much as they had done the day before. They did so rather as a matter of routine and discipline than of necessity, for now nothing more was necessary on earth. They had ample supplies of food to last them beyond the time when they would have no more need of it. It was of no use to dress the gardens and vineyards, or to till the fields that would be blasted into wildernesses before the harvest could be reaped. There was no need to pursue further the triumphs of creative art and science which had transfigured Aeria into a paradise and a fairyland, for in a few weeks all these would be crumbled to dust with their own sepulchres--and yet they took up the work that lay nearest to their hands and went on with it as though they believed that there were still ages of life before humanity, and that the empire of Aeria was to endure for ever. They knew that in work only lay the refuge from the torment of apprehension which might in the end drive even their highly disciplined minds into the delirium of despair and transform their orderly paradise into a pandemonium of anarchy and terror. As soon as the first shock of inevitable horror had passed, as it did during that first terrible night when the death-sentence went from lip to lip throughout the land, their proud spirits rose superior to their physical fears and conquered them, and they resolved that, until the fatal hour came, nothing short of the dissolution of the world should put an end to social order in Aeria. They were the royal race of earth, and when death came they would meet it crowned and sceptred in the gates of their palaces, and die as men who had solved the secret of life and death and so had no fear.