en a sudden
gust seemed to sweep him on again, right into the Gates, and I lost
sight of that man whom I shall never see any more. I wonder whether
he was a saint or a sinner, and what he will find beyond the Gates. A
curlew flew past me, borne out of the darkness, and its cry made me feel
sad and shiver. It might have been the man's soul which wished to look
upon the light again. Then the sun sank, and there was no light, only
the wind moaning, and far, far away the sad cry of the curlew."

This description was simple and unpolished as it was short. Yet it
impressed the mind of Morris, and its curious allegorical note appealed
to his imagination. The grey moss broken by stagnant pools, lonesome
and primeval; the dreary pipe of the wildfowl, the red and angry
sun fronting the gloom of advancing, oblivious night; the solitary
traveller, wind-buffeted, way-worn, aged, heavy-laden, fulfilling the
last stage of his appointed journey to a realm of sleep and shadow. All
these sprang into vision as he read, till the landscape, concentrated,
and expressing itself in its tiny central point of human interest, grew
more real in memory and meaning than many with which he was himself
familiar.

Yet that description was written by an untrained girl not yet seventeen
years of age. But with such from first to last, and this was by no means
the best of them, he found her pages studded.

Then, jotted down from day to day, came the account of the illness
and death of her twin sister, Gudrun, a pitiful tale to read. Hopes,
prayers, agonies of despair, all were here recorded; the last scene also
was set out with a plain and noble dignity, written by the bed of death
in the presence of death. Now under the hand of suffering the child
had become a woman, and, as was fitting, her full soul found relief in
deeper notes. "Good-bye, Gudrun," she ended, "my heart is broken; but I
will mourn for you no more. God has called you, and we give you back
to God. Wait for me, my sister, for I am coming also, and I will not
linger. I will walk quickly."

It was from this sad day of her only sister's death that the first real
developments of the mystical side of Stella's character must be dated.
The sudden vanishing in Gudrun in the bloom of youth and beauty brought
home to her the lesson which all must learn, in such a fashion that
henceforth her whole soul was tinged to its sad hue.

"Now I understand it all," she wrote after returning from the funer