it would never do. He might sleep
for hours. And at the back of his mind lurked a clear conviction that he
was waiting for more than the dawn....

To shake off drowsiness he rose, stretched himself, paced to and fro
several times--and did not sit down again. Folding his arms, he leaned
his shoulders against the stone embrasure; and stood so, a long while,
absorbing--with every faculty of flesh and spirit--the stillness, the
mystery, the pearl-grey light and bottomless gulfs of shadow; his mind
emptied of articulate thought ... his soul poised motionless, as it were
a bird on outspread wings....

Was it fantasy, this gradual intensifying of his uplifted mood, this
breathless stir in the region of his heart, till some vital part of him
seemed gradually withdrawn--up into the vastness and the silence...?

And suddenly, in every nerve, he knew--he was not alone. In the seeming
emptiness of the place, something, some one hovered near him. Amazed,
yet exultant, he held his breath; and an answering leap of the heart set
him tingling from head to foot.

It was more than a vague 'sense of presence.' Fused in the central
happiness that flooded him--as the moonlight flooded the desert--was an
almost startling awareness; not the mere emotional effect of music or a
poem; but sure knowledge that she was there with him in that upper room;
her disembodied tenderness yearning towards him across a barrier of
empty space that neither she nor he could traverse, for all their
nearness, for all their longing....

If Lance himself had come audibly up those endless stairs and stood
beside him, he could not have felt more certain of his presence than he
felt, at this moment, of her companionship, her unspoken assurance that
he _had_ chosen aright. He felt himself, if possible, the less real of
the two.

For that brief space, his world seemed empty of everything, every one,
but they two--so irrevocably sundered, so mysteriously united.

Could he only have sight of her to complete the marvel of it! But
although he kept his eyes on the spot whence the 'feel of her' seemed to
come, not the shadow of a shade could he see; only--was it fancy?--a
hint of brighter radiance than mere moonbeams--there, near the opposite
archway?

He dared not move a finger lest he break the spell. Yet he could not
restrain altogether the emotion that surged in him, that filled his ears
with a soft roar as of breaking waves.

"God bless you, little Mother!" he