From heart to heart flashed their swift thoughts, like lightnings from
cloud to cloud, till all her being was a very sea of joy. Now the great
room was full of presences, and now the curtains were gone and all space
beyond was full of presences, and from that glorious company of a sudden
there arose a song of welcome and beneath the burden of its sweetness
she swooned to sleep.

Barbara dwelt in joy with those she loved and learned many things. She
learned that this sweet new life of hers was what she had fashioned on
the earth with her prayers and strivings; that the seeds of love and
suffering sown down in the world's rank soil had here blossomed to
this perfect flower. Now she knew what was meant by the saying that the
kingdom of Heaven is within you, and by the other saying that as man
sows so shall he reap. She learned that in this world beyond the world,
and that yet itself was but a rung in the ladder of many universes, up
which ladder all souls must climb to the ultimate judgment, there was
sorrow as well as bliss, there were both suffering and delight.

Here the sinful were brought face to face with the naked horror of their
sins, and from it fled wailing and aghast. Here the cruel, the covetous,
the lustful and the liar were as creatures dragged from black caverns
of darkness into the burning light of day. These yearned back to their
darkness and attained sometimes to other coverings of a mortal flesh, or
to some land of which she had no knowledge. For such was their fate if
in them there was no spark of repentant spirit that in this new world
could be fanned to flame.

Upwards or downwards, such is the law of the universe in which nothing
can stand still. Up from the earth which Barbara had left came the
spirit shape of all that lived and could die, even to that of the
flower. But down to the earth it seemed that much of it was whirled
again, to ascend once more in an age to come, since though the stream of
life pulses continually forward, it has its backwash and its eddies.

Barbara learned that though it is blessed to die young and sinless, like
to that glorious child of hers with whom she walked in this heavenly
creation, and whose task it was to instruct her in its simpler
mysteries, to live and to repent is yet more blessed. In this life or
in that all have sinned, but not all have repented, and therefore, it
appeared to Barbara, again and again such must know the burden of the
flesh.

Also