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 a hidden foe fling shafts from an ambush in the rear, even there that Unseen Presence would be behind her as a shield.  “Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Strong in this most human vision of the Divine, she had come down from the Holy Mount, prepared to face the dumb demon she dreaded, the silent acquiescence in deception, which threatened to tear her happiness, bruise her spirit, and cast into the fire and into the waters to destroy them, those treasures which her heart had lately learned to hold so dear.

Prepared for this, she came; and lo, Heaven granted her the second vision.  She saw deep into the heart of a true man’s faithfulness; an example of chivalry, of profound reverence for holy things, which shamed her doubts of him; a self-sacrifice which lifted the great human love, to which she, in her cloistered sanctity, had pictured herself as stooping, far above her, to the ideal of the divine.  Was not this indeed a Vision of Truth?

Crossing the room, Mora laid the robes she carried upon the couch.  While mounting the stairs she had planned, in the secret of her own chamber, to clothe herself in them once again, to hang her jewelled cross about her neck, and thus—­once more Prioress of the White Ladies—­to kneel at our Lady’s shrine, and implore guidance in this final decision.  But now, she laid them gently down upon the bed.

She could not stand fast in this new liberty, with the heavy folds of that white habit entangling her feet in a yoke of bondage.