thorns, and heavy
the cross that I must bear. . . . So I go to my marriage, such as it
is, so I bend my back to the burden, so I bow my head to the storm, and
through it all I thank God for what He has been pleased to send me. I
may seem poor, but how rich I am who have been dowered with a love that
I know to be eternal as my eternal soul."

That was her creed, those were the teachings of her philosophy. And this
was the woman who had loved him, who died loving him. Her very words
came back, spoken but a few seconds before the end:--"Remember every
word which I have said to you. Remember that we are wed--truly wed; that
I go to wait for you, and that even if you do not see me, I will, if I
may, be near you always."

"I go to wait for you. I will be near you always." Here was another
inspiration. For three years or more he had been thinking of her as
dead. Or rather he had thought of her in that nebulous, undefined
fashion in which we consider the dead; the slumberous people who forget
everything, who see nothing; who, if they exist at all, are like stones
upon the beach rolled to and fro blind and senseless, not of their own
desire, but by the waves of a fearful fate that itself is driven on
with the strength of a secret storm of Will. And this fate some call the
Breath of God, and some the working of a soulless force that compels the
universe, past, present, and to be.

But was this view as real as it is common? If Stella were right, if our
religion were right, it must be most wrong. That religion told us that
the Master of mankind descended into Hades to preach to the souls of
men. Did he preach to dumb, ocean-driven stones, to frozen forms and
fossils who had once been men, or to spirits, changed, but active and
existent?

Stella, too, had walked in the valley of doubt, by the path which all
who think must tread; it was written large in the book of her life. But
she had not fainted there; she had lived through its thunder-rains,
its arid blasts of withering dust, its quivering quicksands, and its
mirage-like meadows gay with deceitful, poisonous flowers. At last she
had reached the mountain slopes of Truth to travel up them higher--ever
higher, till she won their topmost peak, where the sun shone undimmed
and the pure air blew; whence the world seemed far away and heaven very
near. Yes, and from that heaven she had called down the spirit of her
lost sister, and thenceforward was content and sure.

She had calle