“What do you think the thing you saw Was, Mrs. Mostyn?”

“The ghost?”

“Yes.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, she answered me—­

“I am certain it was a lost soul:  nothing else could have worn that dreadful look.”

She paused for a few moments and then continued—­

“Perhaps you are one of those who do not believe in the punishment of sin?”

“Who can disbelieve it, Mrs. Mostyn?  Call it what we like, it is a fact.  It confronts us on every side.  We might as well refuse to believe in death.”

“It is not that I meant!  I was talking of punishment in the next world, Mr. Lyndsay.”

“Well, there, too, no doubt it must continue, until the uttermost farthing is paid.  I believe—­at least I hope—­that.”

She shook her head with a troubled expression.

“There is no paying that debt in the next world.  It can only be paid here.  Here, a free pardon is offered to us, and if we do not accept it, then——­ It is the fashion, even among believers, nowadays to avoid this awful subject.  Preachers of the Gospel do not speak of it in the pulpit as they once did.  It is considered too shocking for our modern notions.  I have no patience with such weakness, such folly—­worse than folly.  It seems to me even more wrong to try and hide this terrible danger from ourselves and from others than to deny it altogether, as some poor deluded souls do.  Mr. Lyndsay, have you ever realised what the place of torment will be like?”

“Yes; once, Mrs. Mostyn.”

“You were in pain?”

“I suppose it was pain,” I said.

For always, when anything revives this recollection, seared into my memory, the question rises:  was it merely pain, physical pain, of which we all speak so easily and lightly?  It lasted only ten minutes; ten minutes by the clock, that is.  For me time was annihilated.  There was no past or future, but only an intolerable present, in which mind and soul were blotted out, and all of sentient existence that remained was the animal consciousness of agony.  I cannot share men’s stoical contempt for a Gehenna, which is nothing worse.

“Mr. Lyndsay, imagine pain, worse than any ever endured on earth going on and on, for ever!”

A bird, not a thrush, but one of the minor singers, lighting on a bough near us, trilled one simple but ecstatic phrase.

“Do you really and truly believe, Mrs. Mostyn, that this will be the fate of any single being?”

“Of any single being?  Do we not know that it is what will happen to the greatest number?  For what does the Book say?  ’Many are called but few are chosen.’”

Through the still, mild air, across the sun-steeped gardens, came the voices of the children—­

“Aunt Eleanour!  Aunt Eleanour!”

“Many are called,” she repeated, “but few are chosen; and those who are not chosen shall be cast into everlasting fire.”