She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley’s vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape--the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo’s, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance. “And so death is not the end after all,” in sheer gladness she heard herself exclaiming aloud. “I always knew that it couldn’t be. I believed in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he wasn’t sure about the soul--at least, I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there was St. George Mivart--” Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains. “How beautiful! How satisfying!” she murmured. “Perhaps now I shall really know what it is to live.” As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life. “Have you never really known what it is to live?” the Spirit of Life asked her. “I have never known,” she replied, “that fulness of life which we all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at sea.” “And what do you call the fulness of life?” the Spirit asked again. “Oh, I can’t tell you, if you don’t know,” she said, almost reproachfully. “Many words are supposed to define it--love and sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.” “You were married,” said the Spirit, “yet you did not find the fulness of life in your marriage?” “Oh, dear, no,” she replied, with an indulgent scorn, “my marriage was a very incomplete affair.” “And yet you were fond of your husband?”