Henceforth this thought shall be a part of me! Every morning when I wake I will remember that I am one night nearer to the great dawn, every night when I lie down to sleep I will thank God that another day of waiting has ended with the sunset.
Yes, and I will try to live so that after my last sunset I may meet the end as did Gudrun; without a single doubt or fear, for if I have nothing to reproach myself with, why should I be reproached?
If I have longed for light and lived towards the light, however imperfect I may be, why should I be allotted to the darkness ?" Almost on the next page appeared a prayer "For the welfare and greater glory" of her who was dead, and for the mourner who was left alive, with this quaint note appended: "My father would not approve of this, as it is against the rubric, but all the same I mean to go on praying for the dead.

Why should I not?
If my poor petitions cannot help them who are above the need for help, at least they may show that they are not forgotten.

Oh! that must be the bitter part; to live on full of love and memory and watch forgetfulness creeping into the hearts of the loved and the remembered.

The priests never thought of it, but there lies the real purgatory." The diary showed it to be a little more than a year after this that spiritual doubts began to possess the soul of Stella.

After all, was she not mistaken?
Was there any world beyond the physical?
Were we not mere accidents, born of the will or the chance of the flesh, and shaped by the pressure of centuries of circumstance?
Were not all religions different forms of a gigantic fraud played by his own imagination upon blind, believing man?
And so on to the end of the long list of those questions which are as old as thought.
"I look," she wrote under the influence of this mood, "but everywhere is blackness; blackness without a single star.