what my
trouble has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words.
_It is the spirit that quickeneth_. I should never have felt it so, but
for this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange
places, through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I
have dared to think He had but one, the one I know. I have dared'--and
she faltered--'to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so
long in the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice,
I crept to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was--He was! Leave me
that comfort! What are you saying? Wrong--you? unkind? Your wife knows
nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner
that I didn't care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had
broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have,
a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the
cost--how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it
again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me
back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night;
convict me out of my own mouth! But I _will_ learn my lesson; I will
learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the
voice that speaks to me--I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been
appointed me.'

Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her
chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his
hair.

'But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are
nothing.'

Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the
dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved,
lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who
passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw,
at last the rosy light creeping along the East; caught the white moving
figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air,
which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of
those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.'
For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant.
Dante knew it when he talked of '_quella que imparadisa la mia mente_.'
Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands,
whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of
personality are beaten down by the