the library. He opened one of the windows and looked out. How quiet it
was! He could hear the rising wind sighing through the yews, but all
nature was elsewise asleep. What was she doing down at Rhyd-Alwyn?
Sleeping calmly, or blindly striving to link the past with the
present? He had heard from her but once since he left. Perhaps she too
had had a revelation. He wondered if it were as quiet there as here,
or if the waves at the foot of the castle still thundered unceasingly
on. He wondered if she would shrink from him when the truth came to
her. Doubtless, for she had been reared in the most rigid of moral
conventions, and naturally catholic-minded as she was, right, to her,
was right, and wrong was wrong. He closed the window and, throwing
himself on a sofa, fell asleep. But his dreams were worse than his
waking thoughts. He was wandering in eternal darkness looking for
someone lost ages ago, and a voice beside him was murmuring that he
would never find her, but must go on--on--forever; that the curse
of some crime committed centuries ago was upon him, and that he must
expiate it in countless existences and eternal torment. And far off,
on the very confines of space, floated a wraith-like thing with
the lithe grace of a woman whom he had loved on earth. And she was
searching for him, but they described always the same circle and never
met. And then, finally, after millions of years, an invisible hand
clutched him and bore him upward onto a plane, hitherto unexplored,
then left him to grope his way as he could. All was blackness and
chaos. Around him, as he passed them, he saw that dark suns were
burning, but there was nothing to conduct their light, and they shed
no radiance on the horrors of their world. Below him was an abyss in
which countless souls were struggling, blindly, helplessly, until they
should again be called to duty in some sphere of material existence.
The stillness at first was deathlike, oppressive; but soon he became
aware of a dull, hissing noise, such as is produced on earth by the