ture which I experienced when my past
life was made known to me in its true colours, and it was in this saner
and comparatively painless interval that I met one whom I had known on
earth as a woman of the purest life and character. Being still under the
impression that I was in hell in the sense in which I had been
accustomed to think of that place, I started back upon seeing her, and
cried out in astonishment, "You here! _You_! And in Hades!"

"Where else should I be except where Arthur is?" she answered quietly,
and I then remembered a worthless brother of that name to whom she was
passionately attached. "Even Dives in the parable," she went on, "was
unable to forget the five brethren he had left behind him, and cried out
amid the flames, asking that Lazarus be sent to warn them, lest they,
too, came to that place of torment. Is it likely, then, that any wife,
mother, or sister, worthy the name, would be content to remain idle in
heaven, knowing that a loved one was in hell and in agony? We are told
that after His death Christ preached to the spirits in prison, and I
believe that He came here to hell in search of the so-called lost."

"Tell me," I said, "you who are in heaven, if you are perfectly happy."

"You are not altogether wrong in calling this heaven," she replied,
"although it is little more than the antechamber between earth and
heaven. It is my heaven at present, but it will not be my heaven always,
any more than it will be always your hell, and although it is heaven, it
is not _the_ heaven. When I was on earth, I longed for heaven, _not that
I might be delivered from sorrow, but from sinfulness_; and I think I
may say that I am as happy here as my failures will let me be."

"Your failures!" I exclaimed. "I thought we had done with failures."

"You remember the text in the Koran," she said. "'Paradise is under the
shadow of swords.' Here, as on earth, there is no progress without
effort, and here, too, there are difficulties to be overcome. Yet even
on earth there was one element in the strife which lent dignity even to
our failures. Sin and shame are, after all, only human; the effort and
determination to overcome them are divine. Ceasing to be an angel, Satan
became a devil. Man falls, and even in his fall retains something of
God."

After a time we fell to talking of the past, and, mentioning the name of
the very noblest man I have ever known, a man who made possible the
purity of Sir Galahad, made