During the recent days of sorrow she had again sought the path to her saints and found the greatest solace in prayer; but whenever she uplifted her heart to the Saviour, whose bride she had once so fervently vowed to become, the Redeemer had indeed appeared as usual before the eyes of her soul, but he resembled in form and features Sir Heinz Schorlin, and, instead of turning her away from the world to divine love, she had surrendered herself completely to earthly affection.  Prayer had become sin.  The saint’s song: 

“O Love, Love’s reign announcing,
Why dost thou wound me so? 
Into thy fiercest flames I fling
My heart, my life below.”

no longer invited her to give herself up to be fused into divine love, but merely rendered the need of her own soul clearer, and expressed in words the yearning of her heart for her lover.

Here her aunt interrupted her with the assurance that all this—­she had had the same experience when, renouncing the love of the noblest and best of men, she took the veil—­would be different, wholly different, when with St. Clare’s aid she had again found the path on which she had already once so nearly reached heaven.  Even now she beheld in imagination the day when Eva would look back upon the world she had left as if it were a mere formless mass of clouds.  These were no idle words.  The promise was something derived from her own experience.

On her pilgrimage to Rome she had gazed from an Alpine peak and beheld at her feet nothing save low hills, forests, valleys, and flashing streams, with here and there a village; but she could distinguish neither human beings nor animals; a light mist had veiled everything, converting it into one monotonous surface.  But above her head the sky, like a giant dome free from cloud and mist, arched in a beautiful vault, blue as turquoise and sapphire.  It seemed so close that the eagle soaring near her might reach it with a few strokes of his pinions.  She was steeped in radiance, and the sun shone down upon her with overpowering brilliancy like the eye of God.

Close at her side a gay butterfly hovered about the solitary little white flower which grew from a bare rock on the topmost summit.  In the brilliant light and amidst the solemn silence that butterfly seemed like a transfigured soul, and aroused the question, Who that was permitted to live on this glowing height, so near the Most High, could desire to return to the grey mist below?

So the human soul which soared to the shining height where it was so near heaven, would blissfully enjoy the purity of the air and the un shadowed light which bathed it, and all that was passing in the world below would blend into a single vanquished whole, whose details could no longer be distinguished.  Thus Heinz Schorlin’s image would also mingle with the remainder of the world, lying far below her, to which he belonged.  It should merely incite her to rise nearer and nearer to heaven, to the radiant light above, to which her soul would mount as easily as the eagle that before the pilgrim’s eyes had vanished in the divine blue and the golden sunshine.