al.
"We do not live to die, we die to live. As a grain of sand to the whole
shore, as a drop of water to the whole sea, so is what we call our life
to the real life. Of course one has always been taught that in church,
but I never really comprehended it before. Henceforth this thought shall
be a part of me! Every morning when I wake I will remember that I am one
night nearer to the great dawn, every night when I lie down to sleep I
will thank God that another day of waiting has ended with the sunset.
Yes, and I will try to live so that after my last sunset I may meet the
end as did Gudrun; without a single doubt or fear, for if I have nothing
to reproach myself with, why should I be reproached? If I have longed
for light and lived towards the light, however imperfect I may be, why
should I be allotted to the darkness?"

Almost on the next page appeared a prayer "For the welfare and greater
glory" of her who was dead, and for the mourner who was left alive, with
this quaint note appended: "My father would not approve of this, as it
is against the rubric, but all the same I mean to go on praying for the
dead. Why should I not? If my poor petitions cannot help them who
are above the need for help, at least they may show that they are not
forgotten. Oh! that must be the bitter part; to live on full of love and
memory and watch forgetfulness creeping into the hearts of the loved and
the remembered. The priests never thought of it, but there lies the real
purgatory."

The diary showed it to be a little more than a year after this that
spiritual doubts began to possess the soul of Stella. After all, was she
not mistaken? Was there any world beyond the physical? Were we not mere
accidents, born of the will or the chance of the flesh, and shaped
by the pressure of centuries of circumstance? Were not all religions
different forms of a gigantic fraud played by his own imagination upon
blind, believing man? And so on to the end of the long list of those
questions which are as old as thought.

"I look," she wrote under the influence of this mood, "but everywhere
is blackness; blackness without a single star. I cry aloud, but the only
answer is the echo of my own voice beating back upon me from the deaf
heavens. I pray for faith, yet faith fades and leaves me. I ask for
signs, and there is no sign. The argument? So far as I have read and
heard, it seems the other way. And yet I do not believe their proofs. I
do not believe that so