“Yes, but there is still the awful fact of death to face; Nature herself has been temporarily dead before she blooms into beauty; she dies every autumn, to rise again in the same form every spring.  But how do we know in what form we shall emerge from the chrysalis?  As soon as a man begins to think at all, he stands face to face with this hideous problem, to the solution of which he knows himself to be drawing daily nearer.  His position, I often think, is worse than that of a criminal under sentence, because the criminal is only being deprived of the employment of a term, indefinite, indeed, but absolutely limited; but man at large does not know of what he is deprived, and what he must inherit in the aeons that await him.  It is the uncertainty of death that is its most dreadful part, and, with that hanging over our race, the wonder to me is not only that we, for the most part, put the subject entirely out of mind, but that we can ever think seriously of anything else.”

“I remember,” answered Angela, “once thinking very much in the same way, and I went to Mr. Fraser for advice.  ‘The Bible,’ he said, ’will satisfy your doubts and fears, if only you will read it in a right spirit.’  And indeed, more or less, it did.  I cannot, of course, venture to advise you, but I pass his advice on; it is that of a very good man.”

“Have you, then, no dread of death, or, rather, of what lies beyond it?”

She turned her eyes upon him with something of wonder in them.

“And why,” she said, “should I, who am immortal, fear a change that I know has no power to harm me, that can, on the contrary, only bring me nearer to the purpose of my being?  Certainly I shrink from death itself, as we all must, but of the dangers beyond I have no fear.  Pleasant as this world is at times, there is something in us all that strives to rise above it, and, if I knew that I must die within this hour, I believe that I could meet my fate without a qualm.  I am sure that when our trembling hands have drawn the veil from Death, we shall find His features, passionless indeed, but very beautiful.”

Arthur looked at her with astonishment, wondering what manner of woman this could be, who, in the first flush of youth and beauty, could face the great unknown without a tremor.  When he spoke again, it was with something of envious bitterness.

“Ah! it is very well for you, whose life has been so pure and free from evil, but it is different for me, with all my consciousness of sins and imperfections.  For me, and thousands like me, strive as we will, immortality has terrors as well as hopes.  It is, and always will be, human to fear the future, for human nature never changes.  You know the lines in ‘Hamlet.’  It is

    “’that the dread of something after death,—­

The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns,—­puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of. 
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’