“Last night?  I not only believed, I saw, I felt it with a sudden intuition conveyed to me in some inexplicable manner by the vision of that face.  I felt the utter insignificance of what we name existence, and I perceived too behind it that which it conceals from us—­the real Life, illimitable, unfathomable, the element of our true being, with its eternal possibilities of misery or joy.”

“And all this came to you through something of an evil nature?”

“Yes; it was like the effect of lightning oh a pitch-dark night—­the same vivid and lurid illumination of things unperceived before.  It must be like the revelation of death, I should think, without, thank God, that fearful sense of the irrevocable which death must bring with it.  Will you not rest here?”

For we had reached Beggar’s Stile.  But I was not tired for once, so keen, so life-giving was the air, sparkling with that fine elixir whereby morning braces us for the day’s conflict.  Below, through slowly-dissolving mists, the village showed as if it smiled, each little cottage hearth lifting its soft spiral of smoke to a zenith immeasurably deep, immaculately blue.

“But the ghost itself?” I said, looking up at him as we both rested our arms upon the gate.  “What do you think of that?”

“I am afraid there is no possible doubt what that was.  Its face, as I tell you, was a revelation of evil—­evil and its punishment.  It was a lost soul.”

“Do you mean by a lost soul, a soul that is in never-ending torment?”

“Not in physical torment, certainly; that would be a very material interpretation of the doctrine.  Besides, the Church has always recognised degree and difference in the punishment of the lost.  This, however, they all have in common—­eternal separation from the Divine Being.”

“Even if they repent and desire to be reunited to Him?”

“Certainly; that must be part of their suffering.”

“And yet you believe in a good God?”

“In what else could I believe, even without revelation?  But goodness, divine goodness, is far from excluding severity and wrath, and even vengeance.  Here the witness of science and of history are in accord with that of the Christian Church; their first manifestation of God is always of ‘one that is angry with us and threatens evil.’”

The carriage had overtaken us and stopped now close to us.  I rose to say good-bye.  Austyn shook me by the hand and moved towards the carriage; then, as if checked by a sudden thought, returned upon his steps and stood before me, his earnest eyes fixed upon me as if the whole self-denying soul within him hungered to waken mine.