"You are not altogether wrong in calling this heaven," she replied, "although it is little more than the antechamber between earth and heaven. It is my heaven at present, but it will not be my heaven always, any more than it will be always your hell, and although it is heaven, it is not _the_ heaven. When I was on earth, I longed for heaven, _not that I might be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness_; and I think I may say that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be." "Your failures!" I exclaimed. "I thought we had done with failures." "You remember the text in the Koran," she said. "'Paradise is under the shadow of swords.' Here, as on earth, there is no progress without effort, and here, too, there are difficulties to be overcome. Yet even on earth there was one element in the strife which lent dignity even to our failures. Sin and shame are, after all, only human; the effort and determination to overcome them are divine. Ceasing to be an angel, Satan became a devil. Man falls, and even in his fall retains something of God." After a time we fell to talking of the past, and, mentioning the name of the very noblest man I have ever known, a man who made possible the purity of Sir Galahad, made possible the courage of Coeur de Lion--I had almost said made possible the sinfulness of Christ--I inquired whether she had seen him in Paradise. "As yet," she answered, "I know only one of the many circles into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it. But I suspect that if you and I could see where he is, we should find him infinitely nearer to the Father-heart of the universe than I at least can for countless ages hope to attain!" "What do you mean by 'circles'?" I said. "Is each human soul on its arrival here assigned a fitting place and level among his or her spiritual fellows?" "There is some such gathering of like to like as that of which you speak," she answered. "The majority begin in a lower circle, and remain there until they are fitted to move onward to a higher sphere. Others take a place in that higher sphere immediately, and some few are led into the Holy Presence straightway." And then her voice seemed to sound to me like the voice of one in the far distance; I felt the darkness closing in upon me on every side, and knew that my hour of punishment was again at hand. _III.--DEAD SOULS_ Of all the faces which I saw in hell, there was one which had for me a fascination. It was that of a beautiful woman, queenly of manner, fair of figure as a fullblown lily, and with those dark eyes that seem to shine out from soul-depths, deep as the distant heaven, and yet may mean no more than the shallow facing of quicksilver behind a milliner's mirror.