We walked back to the house amid a rosy sunset, and it was with no surprise that I heard her complain of an agonizing nervous headache, which compelled her at once to retire, and call for assistance.  As for myself, while going homeward, I reflected with astonishment on the unflagging spiritual energy with which, for hour after hour, she had swept over lands and seas of thought, and, as my own excitement cooled, I became conscious of exhaustion, as if a week’s life had been concentrated in a day.

The interview, thus hastily sketched, may serve as a fair type of our usual intercourse.  Always I found her open-eyed to beauty, fresh for wonder, with wings poised for flight, and fanning the coming breeze of inspiration.  Always she seemed to see before her,

  “A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
    Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
  And the invisible rain did ever sing
    A silver music on the mossy lawn.”

Yet more and more distinctly did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow in her thought and speech, like the wail of an AEolian harp heard at intervals from some upper window.  She had never met one who could love her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed.  Through the mask of slight personal defects and ungraceful manners, of superficial hauteur and egotism, and occasional extravagance of sentiment, no equal had recognized the rare beauty of her spirit.  She was yet alone.

Among her papers remains this pathetic petition:—­

’I am weary of thinking.  I suffer great fatigue from living.  Oh God, take me! take me wholly!  Thou knowest that I love none but Thee.  All this beautiful poesy of my being lies in Thee.  Deeply I feel it.  I ask nothing.  Each desire, each passionate feeling, is on the surface only; inmostly Thou keepest me strong and pure.  Yet always to be thus going out into moments, into nature, and love, and thought!  Father, I am weary!  Reassume me for a while, I pray Thee.  Oh let me rest awhile in Thee, Thou only Love!  In the depth of my prayer I suffer much.  Take me only awhile.  No fellow-being will receive me.  I cannot pause; they will not detain me by their love.  Take me awhile, and again I will go forth on a renewed service.  It is not that I repine, my Father, but I sink from want of rest, and none will shelter me.  Thou knowest it all.  Bathe me in the living waters of Thy Love.’

VII.

THE FRIEND.

* * * * *

Yet, conscious as she was of an unfulfilled destiny, and of an undeveloped being, Margaret was no pining sentimentalist.  The gums oozing from wounded boughs she burned as incense in her oratory; but in outward relations she was munificent with sympathy.

    ’Let me be, Theodora, a bearer of heavenly gifts to my
    fellows,’