d been for you.
You were the only person who could waken it in me. The power to love is
the great gift; to be permitted to know that marvel, to be allowed once
in one's life to touch the infinite. Love opens all the doors. Some
opened in pain, but they did open. I never knew, I never guessed until
long after you had come into my life, and gone away again, how much I
owed to you. Then I began to see, first in gleams, and then plainly.
Your momentary attraction towards me was a tiny spark of the Divine
love, a sort of little lantern leading me home through the dark."

He stared at her amazed. Her transparency transfixed him. What is
superficial is also often deep in clear natures such as Magdalen's, like
a water lily whose stem goes down a long way.

"Love releases us from ourselves, our hard proud selves, and makes
everything possible to flow in to us, happiness, peace, joy, gratitude.
I thank God for having let me know you, for having made me love you. I
might have missed it. I see others miss it. I might have gone through
life not knowing. I might have had to bear the burden of life, without
the one thing that makes it easy. I see other people toiling and
moiling, and getting hopeless and miserable and exhausted till my heart
aches for them. After the first I have never toiled, never grieved,
never despaired. I have been sustained always. For there are not two
kinds of love, Everard, but only one. The love of you is the cup of
water, and the love of God is the well it is taken from.... You had
better go now before anyone else comes in, but I want you to remember
when you think of me that I bless and thank you, and am grateful to you.
I have been grateful for years."

She took his leaden hand in both of hers, and held it for a moment to
her lips.

Lord Lossiemouth's face was pinched and aged. His hand fell out of
hers.

Then his face became suddenly convulsed, frightful to behold, like that
of a man being squeezed to death.

"I never loved you," he said in a fierce, suffocated voice. "I was a
little in love with you, that was all, and that was not much. I soon got
over it."

"I know," she said.

"I felt pain for a time. You were very beautiful, and you were the
first. I was the same as you then. But I found other beautiful women. I
took what I could get out of life, and out of women. I rubbed out my
pain that way. It was not your father who parted us, it was myself. I
would not own it, I was always bitter aga