summer, . . still, to me, for once God’s golden days seemed long!  I had lost thee!  Thou wert my soul’s other soul. my king!—­ my immortality’s completion! ... and though thou wert, alas! a fallen brightness, yet I held fast to my one hope, . . the hope in thy diviner nature, which, though sorely overcome, was not, and could not be wholly destroyed.  I knew the fate in store for thee, . .  I knew that thou with other erring spirits wert bound to live again on earth when Christ had built His Holy Way therefrom to Heaven,—­and never did I cease for thy dear sake to wait and watch and pray!  At last I found thee, ... but ah! how I trembled for thy destiny!  To thee had been delivered, as to all the children of men, the final message of salvation.. the Message of Love and Pardon which made all the angels wonder! ... but thou didst utterly reject it—­and with the same willful arrogance of thy former self, Sah-luma, thou wert blindly and desperately turning anew into darkness!  O my Beloved, that darkness might have been eternal! ... and crowded with memories dating from the very beginning of life! ...  Nay, let me not speak of that Supernal Agony, since Christ hath died to quench its terrors! ...  Enough!—­by happy chance, through my desire, thine own roused better will, and the strength of one who hath many friends in Heaven, thy spirit was released to temporary liberty, . . and in thy vision at Dariel, which was no vision, but a Truth, I bade thee meet me here.  And why? ...  Solely to test thy power of obedience to A divine impulse unexplainable by human reason,—­and I rejoiced as only angels can rejoice, when of thine own Free-Will thou didst keep the tryst I made with thee!  Yet thou knewest me not! ... or rather thou wouldst not know me, . . till I left thee! ...  ’Tis ever the way of mortals, to doubt their angels in disguise!”

Her sweet accents shook with a liquid thrill suggestive of tears, —­but he was silent.  It seemed to him that he would be well content to hold his place forever, if forever he might hear her thus melodiously speak on!  Had she not called him her “other soul, her king, her immortality’s completion!”—­and on those wondrous words of hers his spirit hung, impassioned, dazzled, and entranced beyond all Time and Space and Nature and Experience!

After a brief pause, during which his ravished mind floated among the thousand images and vague feelings of a whole Past and Future merged in one splendid and celestial Present, she resumed, always softly and with the same exquisite tenderness of tone: 

“I left thee, Dearest, but a moment, ... and in that moment, He who hath himself shared in human sorrows and sympathies,—­He who is the embodiment of the Essence of God’s Love,—­came to my aid.  Plunging thy senses in deep sleep, as hath been done before to many a saint and prophet of old time here on this very field of Ardath,—­he summoned up before thee the phantoms of a portion of thy Past, ... phantoms which, to thee, seemed far more real than the living presence of thy faithful Edris! ... alas, my Beloved! ... thou art not the only one on the Sorrowful Star who accepts a Dream for Reality and rejects Reality as a Dream!”