and remote some
of our friendships seemed--so much older and larger than could be
accounted for by the brief days of companionship? That strange hunger
for the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what has
been. Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you will
move farther afield, and you will come near to spirits you have loved.
You cannot bear it yet, though they are all about you; but one regains
the spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours."

"Can I revisit," I said, "the scene of my last life--see and know what
those I loved are doing and feeling?"

"Not yet," said Amroth; "that would not profit either you or them. The
sorrow of earth would not be sorrow, it would have no cleansing power,
if the parted spirit could return at once. You do not guess, either, how
much of time has passed already since you came here--it seems to you
like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death. To meet loss
and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the
finest of lessons. When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we
here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave
behind, it would be all too easy. It is in the silence of death that its
virtue lies."

"Yes," I said, "I do not desire to return. This is all too wonderful. It
is the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me. I do
not desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think of
it, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body was
faint and weary. The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and loved
and exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because one
was content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were. It was
the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was
the shame."

VI

One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no
religion here!"

"I know what you mean," he said. "I think it is one of the things that
one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing
religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to
be so."

"Yes," I said, "as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game
played by a few players, a game with a great many rules."

"Yes," he said, "it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief
of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be
something else--to contain the secr