“As yet,” she answered, “I know only one of the many circles into which the spirit-world seems naturally to resolve it.  But I suspect that if you and I could see where he is, we should find him infinitely nearer to the Father-heart of the universe than I at least can for countless ages hope to attain!”

“What do you mean by ’circles’?” I said.  “Is each human soul on its arrival here assigned a fitting place and level among his or her spiritual fellows?”

“There is some such gathering of like to like as that of which you speak,” she answered.  “The majority begin in a lower circle, and remain there until they are fitted to move onward to a higher sphere.  Others take a place in that higher sphere immediately, and some few are led into the Holy Presence straightway.”

And then her voice seemed to sound to me like the voice of one in the far distance; I felt the darkness closing in upon me on every side, and knew that my hour of punishment was again at hand.

III.—­DEAD SOULS

Of all the faces which I saw in hell, there was one which had for me a fascination.  It was that of a beautiful woman, queenly of manner, fair of figure as a fullblown lily, and with those dark eyes that seem to shine out from soul-depths, deep as the distant heaven, and yet may mean no more than the shallow facing of quicksilver behind a milliner’s mirror.

On earth she had deliberately set herself to win and to break the heart of a trusting lad, and the punishment of her sin was that she should now love him with the same intense but hopeless passion with which he had loved her.  “My heart is broken,” I heard her sob, “and in hell one cannot die of a broken heart.  If I had loved him, and he me, and he had died, I could have borne it, knowing that I should meet him hereafter; but to live loveless through eternity, that is the thought which kills me.”

Another sight which I saw was that of a desolate plain, low-lying and unlighted, in the centre of which there roamed one who called out as if in search of a companion, but to whom there came no answer save the echo of his own voice.  A more lonely and lifeless spot I have never seen.  The silence seemed sometimes to oppress him like a presence, for, with a half-affrighted and despairing cry, he set off at a panic-stricken run, as if seeking to escape this silence by flight; but, notwithstanding his haste, he made no progress, for he was but moving round and round in a circle.  Once, when he passed near me, I heard him cry out:  “Is there no living soul in all this void and voiceless desert?” And, as he hurried by, I recognised him as a man whom I had often heard say on earth that hell would not be hell to him so long as he and his boon companions were together.