For three years or more he had been thinking of her as dead.

Or rather he had thought of her in that nebulous, undefined fashion in which we consider the dead; the slumberous people who forget everything, who see nothing; who, if they exist at all, are like stones upon the beach rolled to and fro blind and senseless, not of their own desire, but by the waves of a fearful fate that itself is driven on with the strength of a secret storm of Will.

And this fate some call the Breath of God, and some the working of a soulless force that compels the universe, past, present, and to be.
But was this view as real as it is common?
If Stella were right, if our religion were right, it must be most wrong.

That religion told us that the Master of mankind descended into Hades to preach to the souls of men.

Did he preach to dumb, ocean-driven stones, to frozen forms and fossils who had once been men, or to spirits, changed, but active and existent?
Stella, too, had walked in the valley of doubt, by the path which all who think must tread; it was written large in the book of her life.