passion and fear, she flung her
arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my
heart and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her.

Almost immediately afterwards, we heard the opening of doors, which
indicated her mother's home-coming; but, before leaving, Dorothy told me
that the room immediately above mine was her own. Of the hell-born
thought which rose in my mind as I listened she, I am sure, had no
suspicion. Need I tell the remainder of my story? I think not.

* * * * *

You may wonder, perhaps, why I recall circumstances that happened so
many years ago. You would cease to wonder had you seen the ghost of the
past rise up to call upon God and His Christ for judgment upon the
betrayer. For this was my first glimpse of hell; this was my day of
judgment. The recording angel of my awakened conscience showed me my
sin, and the ruin my sin had wrought, as God sees, and I realised
that--But no! I am sick, I am fainting! I cannot--I cannot write more.

_II.--The Secret of Man's Destiny_

"When anyone dies," I had been told in childhood, "he goes either to
heaven or to hell, according to whether he has been a good or bad man,"
and I recollect being not a little troubled as to what became of the
people whose virtues were about equally matched with their vices. When I
opened my eyes in that ante-chamber of the spirit-world into which I
have had admittance I discovered that heaven and hell as separate places
have no existence, for the good, the bad, and the indifferent exist
together exactly as they exist here. I do not say that there will be no
day of harvesting in which the tares shall finally be separated from the
wheat. On that point, as on many others, I am ignorant. Men and women
whom I know on earth speak of the dead--"the changed"--as being
perfected in knowledge and as having solved for ever "the great secret."
That is not my experience.

So far from "the great secret," the secret of man's destiny and God's
Being, becoming known at death, the facts as I found them are that these
remain almost as great a mystery after death as before.

Even in hell (I use the word as indicating mental or physical
suffering--in my case, the former--not with any local significance)
there are moments when the anguish-stricken spirit is mercifully allowed
a temporary reprieve. Such a moment occurred after the first awful
paroxysm of self-loathing and tor