the crown on His Mother's head; she
heard Him sing a few notes, and then the saints began to sing. The
window filled up with song and colour, and all along the window there
was a continual transmutation of colour and song. The figures grew
taller, and they breathed extraordinary life. It sang like a song
within them, and it flowed about them and out of them in a sort of
pearl-coloured mist. The vision clove the church along and across, and
through it she could see the priest saying his Mass, and when he raised
the Host above his head, Biddy saw Our Lord look at her, and His eyes
brightened as if with love of her. He seemed to have forgotten the
saints that sang His praises so beautifully, and when He bent towards
her and she felt His presence about her, she cried out:--

"He is coming to take me in His arms!"

And it was then that Biddy fell out of her place and lay at length on
the floor of the church, pale as a dead woman. The clerk went to her,
but he could not carry her out; she lay rigid as one who had been dead
a long while and she muttered, "He is coming to put the gold crown on
my head." The clerk moved away, and she swooned again.

Her return to her ordinary perceptions was slow and painful. The people
had left long ago, and she tottered out of the empty church and
followed the road to her cabin without seeing it or the people whom she
met on the road. At last a woman took her by the arm and led her into
her cabin, and spoke to her. She could not answer at first, but she
awoke gradually, and she began to remember that she had heard music in
the window and that Our Lord had sung to her. The neighbour left her
babbling. She began to feed her chickens, and was glad when she had fed
them. She wanted to think of the great and wonderful sights she had
seen. She could not particularise, preferring to remember her vision as
a whole, unwilling to separate the music from the colour, or the colour
and the music from the adoration of the saints.

As the days went by her life seemed to pass more and more out of the
life of the ordinary day. She seemed to live, as it were, on the last
verge of human life; the mortal and the immortal mingled; she felt she
had been always conscious of the immortal, and that nothing had
happened except the withdrawing of a veil. The memory of her vision was
still intense in her, but she wished to renew it; and waited next
Sunday breathless with anticipation. The vision began at the same
mo