for she felt that something mighty,
hitherto unknown to her, and incomprehensible even to herself, was
passing in her soul, and that a nameless but potent something had grown
up in her heart, had struggled free, and had found life and motion; a
something that was strange, and yet precious to her, frightening, and yet
sweet, a pain, and yet unspeakably delightful. An emotion such as she had
never before known had mastered her, and she felt, since hearing
Polykarp's speech, as if a new and purer blood was flowing rapidly
through her veins. Every nerve quivered like the leaves of the poplars in
her former home when the wind blows down to meet the Rhone, and she found
it difficult to follow what Paulus said, and still more so to find the
right answer to his questions.

As soon as she was alone she sat down on her bed, rested her elbows on
her knees, and her head in her hand, and the growing and surging flood of
her passion broke out in an abundant stream of warm tears.

She had never wept so before; no anguish, no bitterness was infused into
the sweet refreshing dew of those tears. Fair flowers of never dreamed of
splendor and beauty blossomed in the heart of the weeping woman, and when
at length her tears ceased, there was a great silence, but also a great
glory within her and around her. She was like a man who has grown up in
an under-ground-room, where no light of day can ever shine, and who at
last is allowed to look at the blue heavens, at the splendor of the sun,
at the myriad flowers and leaves in the green woods, and on the meadows.

She was wretched, and yet a happy woman.

"That is love!" were the words that her heart sang in triumph, and as her
memory looked back on the admirers who had approached her in Arelas when
she was still little more than a child, and afterwards in Rome, with
tender words and looks, they all appeared like phantom forms carrying
feeble tapers, whose light paled pitifully, for Polykarp had now come on
the scene, bearing the very sun itself in his hands.

"They--and he," she murmured to herself, and she beheld as it were a
balance, and on one of the scales lay the homage which in her vain fancy
she had so coveted. It was of no more weight than chaff, and its whole
mass was like a heap of straw, which flew up as soon as Polykarp laid his
love--a hundredweight of pure gold, in the other scale.

"And if all the nations and kings of the earth brought their treasures
together," thought she,