"And that--?"

"That was simply dreadful. I can't tell you what it was like. I could
not have imagined it, if I had not seen it. It was the look--the look
in its eyes. After all these years it makes me tremble when I think of
it. But what I felt was not the same nervous feeling which made me
afraid to turn round. It went much deeper--indeed it went deeper than
anything in my life had ever gone before; it went right down to my soul,
in fact, and made me feel I had a soul."

She had turned quite pale.

"Yes, Mr. Lyndsay, strange as it sounds, the mere sight of that face
made me realise in an instant what I had read and heard thousands of
times, and what my mother and Henrietta had told me over and over again
about the utter nothingness of earthly aims and comforts--of what in an
ordinary way is called life. I had heard very fine sermons preached
about the same thing: 'What is our life, it is even a vapour,' and the
'vain shadow' in which we walk. Have you ever thought how we can go on
hearing and even repeating true and wise words without getting at their
real sense, and, what is worse, without suspecting our own ignorance?"

"I know it well."

"When Henrietta used to say that the whirl of worldly occupations and
interests and amusements in which I was so engrossed did not deserve to
be called life, and could never satisfy the eternal soul within me, it
used to seem to me an exaggerated way of saying that the next world
would be better than this one; but I saw the meaning of her words, I saw