inky night, round which I spun perpetually, as it seemed for hours and
hours. But worst of all was the awful loneliness from which I suffered.
It seemed to me as though there were no other living thing in all the
Universe and never had been and never would be any other living thing. I
felt as though _I_ were the Universe rushing solitary through space for
ages upon ages in a frantic search for fellowship, and finding none.

Then something seemed to grip my throat and I knew that I had died--for
the world floated away from beneath me.

Now fear and every mortal sensation left me, to be replaced by a new and
spiritual terror. I, or rather my disembodied consciousness, seemed to
come up for judgment, and the horror of it was that I appeared to be my
own judge. There, a very embodiment of cold justice, my Spirit,
grown luminous, sat upon a throne and to it, with dread and merciless
particularity I set out all my misdeeds. It was as if some part of me
remained mortal, for I could see my two eyes, my mouth and my hands, but
nothing else--and strange enough they looked. From the eyes came tears,
from the mouth flowed words and the hands were joined, as though in
prayer to that throned and adamantine Spirit which was ME.

It was as though this Spirit were asking how my body had served
its purposes and advanced its mighty ends, and in reply--oh! what a
miserable tale I had to tell. Fault upon fault, weakness upon weakness,
sin upon sin; never before did I understand how black was my record. I
tried to relieve the picture with some incidents of attempted good, but
that Spirit would not hearken. It seemed to say that it had gathered up
the good and knew it all. It was of the evil that it would learn, not
of the good that had bettered it, but of the evil by which it had been
harmed.

Hearing this there rose up in my consciousness some memory of what
Ayesha had said; namely, that the body lived within the temple of the
spirit which is oft defied, and not the spirit in the body.

The story was told and I hearkened for the judgment, my own judgment on
myself, which I knew would be accepted without question and registered
for good or ill. But none came, since ere the balance sank this way or
that, ere it could be uttered, I was swept afar.

Through Infinity I was swept, and as I fled faster than the light, the
meaning of what I had seen came home to me. I knew, or seemed to know
for the first time, that at the last _man must