I waited,—­there was a brief silence.  Then a sudden wave of music broke upon my ears,—­a breaking foam of rhythmic melody that rose and fell in a measured cadence of solemn sound.  Raising my eyes in fear and awe, I saw the lambent light around me begin to separate into countless gradations of delicate colour till presently it resembled a close and brilliant network of rainbow tints intermingled with purest gold.  It was as if millions of lines had been drawn with exquisite fineness and precision so as to cause intersection or ‘reciprocal meeting’ at given points of calculation, and these changed into various dazzling forms too brilliant for even my dreaming sight to follow.  Yet I felt myself compelled to study one particular section of these lines which shone before me in a kind of pale brightness, and while I looked it varied to more and more complex ‘moods’ of colour and light, if one might so express it, till, by gradual degrees, it returned again to the simpler combination.

“Thus are the destinies of human lives woven and interwoven,”—­said the Voice—­“From infinite and endless points of light they grow and part and mingle together, till the destined two are one.  Often they are entangled and disturbed by influences not their own—­but from interference which through weakness or fear they have themselves permitted.  But the tangle is for ever unravelled by Time,—­the parted threads are brought together again in the eternal weaving of Spirit and Matter.  No power, human or divine, can entirely separate the lives which God has ordained shall come together.  Man’s ordainment is not God’s ordainment!  Wrong threads in the weaving are broken—­no matter how,—­no matter when!  Love must be tender yet resolved!—­Love must not swerve from its given pledge!—­Love must be All or Nothing!”

The light network of living golden rays still quivered before my eyes, till all at once they seemed to change to a rippling sea of fine flame with waves that gently swayed to and fro, tipped with foam-crests of prismatic hue like broken rainbows.  Wave after wave swept forward and broke in bright amethystine spray close to me where I knelt, and as I watched this moving mass of radiant colour in absorbed fascination, one wave, brilliant as the flush of a summer’s dawn, rippled towards me, and then gently retiring, left a single rose, crimson and fragrant, close within my reach.  I stooped and caught it quickly—­surely it was a real rose from some dewy garden of the earth, and no dream!

“One rose from all the roses in Heaven!” said the mystic Voice, in tones of enthralling sweetness—­“One—­fadeless and immortal!—­only one, but sufficient for all!  One love from all the million loves of men and women—­one, but enough for Eternity!  How long the rose has awaited its flowering,—­how long the love has awaited its fulfilment—­only the recording angels know!  Such roses bloom but once in the wilderness of space and time; such love comes but once in a Universe of worlds!”