effable 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?"

"You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I
was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old
nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple.
But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house
full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going
in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the
sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list;
but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors
perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to the