nding down over her shoulder.
And, when he came, she did not need to speak, but only to gaze into the
well-beloved face, familiar, yet touched--as it seemed to her--with a
mysterious and awful beauty, beholding which she divined the answer to
many questions.

For she perceived, as one waking from an uneasy dream perceives the
comfortable truth of day, that her love was not given back to her, for
the dear reason that her love had never been taken away. The fiction of
Time ceased to rule in her, so that the joy of bride and new-wed wife,
the strange, sweet perplexities of dawning motherhood were with her
now, not as memories merely, but as actual, ever present, deathless
fact--the culminating, and therefore permanent, revelation of her
individual experience. She perceived this continued and must continue,
since it was the fine flower of her nature, the unit of her personal
equation, the realisation of the eternal purpose concerning her of
Almighty God. This fiction of old age was discredited, so was the
bitterness of deposition, the mournful fiction of being passed by and
relegated to the second place. Her place was her own. Her standing
ground in the universal order, a freehold, absolute and inalienable.
She could not abdicate her throne, neither could any wrest it away from
her. She perceived that not self-effacement, but self-development, not
dissolution, but evolution, was the service required of her. And, as
divinely designed contribution to that end was every joy, every sorrow,
laid upon her, since by these was she differentiated from all others,
by these was she built up into a separate existence, sane, harmonious,
well-proportioned, a fair lamp lighted with a burning coal from off the
altar of that God of whom it is written, not only that He is a
consuming fire, but that He is Love.

All this, and more, did Katherine apprehend, beholding the familiar,
yet mysterious countenance of her well-beloved. And the tendency of
that apprehension made for tranquillity of spirit, for a sure and
certain hope. The faculty which reasons, demands explanation and proof,
might not be satisfied, but that higher faculty which divines, accepts,
believes, assuredly was so. Nor could it be otherwise, since it is the
spirit, the idea, not the letter, which giveth life.

How long she stood thus, in tender and illuminating, though wordless,
communion with the dead, Katherine did not know. The deepest spiritual
experiences, like the most