I do not know how long I lay there lost to sight and sense, but when I came to myself, I was in a quiet, shadowy place, like a kind of little hermitage, with a window opening out upon the sea.  I was lying on a couch, with the veil I had worn still covering me, and as I opened my eyes and looked about me I saw that it was night, and that the moon was tracing a silver network of beams across the waves.  There was a delicious fragrance on the air—­it came from a group of roses set in a tall crystal vase close to where I lay.  Then, as I gradually regained full knowledge of my own existence, I perceived a table in the room with a lamp burning upon it, and at the table sat no less a personage than Aselzion himself, reading.  I was so amazed at the sight of him that for the moment I lay inert, afraid to move—­for I was almost sure I had incurred his displeasure—­till suddenly, with the feeling of a child seeking pardon for an offence, I sprang up and ran to him, throwing myself on my knees at his feet.

“Aselzion, forgive me!” I murmured—­“I have done wrong—­I had no right to go so far—­”

He turned his eyes upon me, smiling, and took me gently by the hands.

“Who denies your right to go far if you have the strength and courage?”—­he said—­“Dear child, I have nothing to forgive!  You are the maker of your own destiny!  But you have been bold!—­though you are a mere woman you have dared to do what few men attempt.  This is the power of love within you—­that perfect love which casteth out fear!  You risked a danger which has not harmed you—­you have come out of it unscathed,—­so may it be with every ordeal through which you may yet be tried as by fire!”

He raised me from where I knelt,—­but I still held his hands.

“I could not help it!” I said—­“Your command for me was ’silence and solitude’—­and in that silence and solitude I remained while I watched you all,—­and I heard everything that was said—­this was your wish and order.  And when you all went away, the silence and solitude would have been the same but for that Cross and Star!  They seemed to speak!—­to call me—­to draw me to them—­and I went—­hardly knowing why, yet feeling that I must go!—­and then—­”

Aselzion pressed my hands gently.

“Then the Light claimed its own,”—­he said—­“and courage had its reward!  The door of your recess in the chapel was opened by my instructions,—­I wished to see what you would do.  You have no conception as yet of what you have done!—­but that does not matter.  You have passed one test successfully—­for had you remained passive in your place till someone came to remove you, I should have known you for a creature of weak will and transitory impulses.  But you are stronger than I thought—­so to-night I have come to give you your first lesson.”

“My first lesson!” I repeated the words after him wonderingly as he let go my hands and put me gently into a chair which I had not perceived but which stood in the shadow cast by the lamp almost immediately opposite to him.