blue stencilling of trees along its curve--something suggestive
in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's,
strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the
imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her
heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a
promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

"And so death is not the end after all," in sheer gladness she
heard herself exclaiming aloud. "I always knew that it couldn't
be. I believed in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then
Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul--at least,
I think he did--and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there
was St. George Mivart--"

Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.

"How beautiful! How satisfying!" she murmured. "Perhaps now I
shall really know what it is to live."

As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and
looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of
Life.

"Have you never really known what it is to live?" the Spirit of
Life asked her.

"I have never known," she replied, "that fulness of life which we
all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not
been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which
comes to one sometimes far out at sea."