there to face
out in solitude the hard question of the second issue.

CHAPTER LVI

THE TRUE VISION

To her bedchamber went Mora--she who had been Prioress of the White
Ladies--bearing in her arms the full robes of her Order, and in her
hand the jewelled cross of her high office. She went, expecting to
spend hours in doubt and prayer and question before the shrine of the
Virgin. But, as she pushed open the door and entered the sunlit
chamber, on the very threshold she was met by a flash of inward
illumination. Surely every question had already been answered; the
second issue had been decided, while the first was yet wholly uncertain.

She had said she must have a divine vision. Had she not this very day
been granted a two-fold vision, both human and divine; the Divine,
stooping in unspeakable tenderness and comprehension to the human; the
Human, upborne on the mighty pinions of pure love and stainless honour
in a self-sacrifice which lifted it to the Divine?

In the lonely chapel on the mountain, she had seen her Lord. Not as
the Babe, heralded by angels, worshipped by Eastern shepherds, adored
by Gentile kings, throned on His Mother's knee, wise-eyed and God-like,
stretching omnipotent baby hands toward this mysterious homage which
was His due; accepting, with baby omniscience, the gold, the
frankincense, the myrrh, which typified His mission; nor as the Divine
Redeemer nailed helpless to the cross of shame; dead, that the world
might live. These had been the visions of her cloistered years.

But in the chapel on the mountain she had seen Him as the human Jesus,
tempted in all points like as we are, His only visible halo the "yet
without sin," which set upon His brow in youth and manhood the divine
seal of perfect purity, and in His eyes the clear shining of
uninterrupted intercourse with Heaven.

As she had left the chapel, turning from the sculptured figure which
had helped her to this realisation, she had become wondrously aware of
the Unseen Presence of the Christ, close beside her. "As seeing Him
Who is invisible" she had come down from the mount, conscious that He
went on before. She seemed to be following those blessed footsteps
over the heather of her native hills, even as the disciples of old
followed them through the cornfields of Judea, and over the grassy
slopes of Galilee. Yet conscious also that He moved beside her, with
hand outstretched in case her spirit tripped; and that, should