“I drew back, trembling with anticipation, my heart beating, and my clasped hands folded on my breast in an agony of restraint.  She was talking, talking to herself in the low musical voice of the Martians.  The wind had ceased, a dark shadow from a crossing cloud moved toward us from the river over the blue sprinkled field, a haze stole upward from the farther view, and, bending at the margin of the water the figure of Alca bathed in light, seemed to watch us like some calm incarnate response to my own hopes and prayers.

“‘How beautiful, how wonderful it is!’ her arms dropped from her head, the body bent forward to the earth, she knelt; ’but must it always be as it is!  Shall not the companion of my days come to this dear place?  The light of sun and moon and stars seems as it always seemed on Earth, but there does not come to me the divine touch of affection, that intimate feeling of oneness and self-surrender that was mine with Randolph on the Earth.  A strength unknown to me before, a power of enjoyment, a motion that is ecstacy, thought, feeling, language, all strong, radiant, supreme, but yet loneliness!  Memory of the things of Earth hardly remains, except where love prints its firm expression.  Randolph, my husband, and Bradford, my boy, to me are deathless.  Why can it not be that they should be here also?  Can the purposes of divine love be fulfilled by this separation?  Shall all the powers of this new life, this beautiful and sinless Nature be wasted for the want of love which holds both Nature and the soul in place, in harmony, in adoration of the One enduring Thought?

“’How the long years have rolled by since I have left the Earth, and how, amid all the pleasurable things of this serene and hopeful life, the hidden loneliness has denied it the last completing touch of joy!  Only as I still dare to believe, that the flight of years must end his aging days on Earth, and that the eternal destiny of married souls is an eternal union, and that his reincarnation here shall bring us into a new and better, richer, deeper harmony of mind and tastes and thoughts; only as the belief grows stronger with passing time, can I, so surrounded with peace and happiness, in this countryside of quiet work and gentle cares, bear longer this awful isolation, the nights of prayerful hope, the days of still enduring hope.

“’How beautiful it is to live, to watch the changing seasons in this strange new world untouched by sickness or death or sin.  And yet,’ she convulsively clasped her face, ’what beauty, what peace, what sinlessness can replace the only life—­the Life of Love?

“’And then my boy!  Can it be possible that I may see him!  Why, now he will seem only a brother in this new youth in which I have been born, and yet—­and yet—­the mother feeling is unchanged; the old yearning, just as when I left him a boy upon the Earth seems as great as ever.

“’Oh! when shall this waiting all end in our reunion—­father, mother, son—­and all strong and glad in youth and hope?’