“Yet you were better then,” said Amroth “you thought little of your drudgery, and much of your children.”

Yes, I had had children, I saw.  Their names and appearance floated before me.  I had loved them tenderly.  Had they passed out of my life?  I felt bewildered.

Amroth laid a hand on my arm and smiled again.  “No, you came near to some of them again.  Do you not remember another life in which you loved a friend with a strange love, that surprised you by its nearness?  He had been your child long before; and one never quite loses that.”

I saw in a flash the other life he spoke of.  I was a student, it seemed, at some university, where there was a boy of my own age, a curious, wilful, perverse, tactless creature, always saying and doing the wrong thing, for whom I had felt a curious and unreasonable responsibility.  I had always tried to explain him to other people, to justify him; and he had turned to me fop help and companionship in a singular way.  I saw myself walking with him in the country, expostulating, gesticulating; and I saw him angry and perplexed....  The vision vanished.

“But what becomes of all those whom we have loved?” I said; “it cannot be as if we had never loved them.”

“No, indeed,” said Amroth, “they are all there or here; but there lies one of the great mysteries which we cannot yet attain to.  We shall be all brought together some time, closely and perfectly; but even now, in the world of matter, the spirit half remembers; and when one is strangely and lovingly drawn to another soul, when that love is not of the body, and has nothing of passion in it, then it is some close ancient tie reasserting itself.  Do you not know how old and remote some of our friendships seemed—­so much older and larger than could be accounted for by the brief days of companionship?  That strange hunger for the past of one we love is nothing but the faint memory of what has been.  Indeed, when you have rested happily a little longer, you will move farther afield, and you will come near to spirits you have loved.  You cannot bear it yet, though they are all about you; but one regains the spiritual sense slowly after a life like yours.”

“Can I revisit,” I said, “the scene of my last life—­see and know what those I loved are doing and feeling?”

“Not yet,” said Amroth; “that would not profit either you or them.  The sorrow of earth would not be sorrow, it would have no cleansing power, if the parted spirit could return at once.  You do not guess, either, how much of time has passed already since you came here—­it seems to you like yesterday, no doubt, since you last suffered death.  To meet loss and sorrow upon earth, without either comfort or hope, is one of the finest of lessons.  When we are there, we must live blindly, and if we here could make our presence known at once to the friends we leave behind, it would be all too easy.  It is in the silence of death that its virtue lies.”