“So come and dare the flight!” she concluded with warm enthusiasm.  “The wings you need have grown from your soul, you chosen bride of Heaven.  Use them.  That which now most repels you from the goal will fall away as the snake sheds its skin.  Like the phoenix rising from its ashes, the destruction of the little earthly love which even now causes you more pain than pleasure, will permit the ascent of the great love for Him Who is Love incarnate, the love which encompasses the lonely butterfly on the white blossom in the silent, deserted mountain solitude, which lacks no feather on its wings, no tiniest hair on its feelers, as warmly and carefully as the vast, unlimited universe whose duration ends only with eternity.”

Eva, with labouring breath, had fairly hung upon the lips of the revered woman, who at last gazed upwards with dilated eyes like a prophetess.

When she paused the young girl nodded assent.  Her teacher and friend seemed to have crushed her resistance.

Like the eagle which had disappeared before the pilgrim’s eyes in the azure vault of heaven, the radiant light on the pure summit summoned her pure soul to dare the flight.

The abbess watched with delight the influence of her words upon the soul of her darling, who, gazing thoughtfully at the floor, now seemed to be pondering over what she had urged.

But suddenly Eva raised her bowed head, and her eyes, sparkling with a brighter light, sought those of the abbess.

Her quick intellect had attentively considered what she had heard, and her vivid power of imagination had enabled her to transfer to reality the picture which had already half won her over to her friend’s wishes.

“No, Aunt Kunigunde, no!” she began, raising her hands as if in repulse.  “Your radiant height strongly allures me also, yet, gladly as I believe that, for many the world would be easily forgotten above, where no sound from it reaches us and the mist conceals individual figures from our eyes, for me, now that love has filled my heart, it would be impossible to ascend the peak alone and without him.

“Hear me, aunt!

“What was it that attracted me so powerfully from the beginning?  At first, as you know, the hope of making him a combatant for the possessions which I have learned through you to regard as the highest and most sacred.  Then, when love came, when a new power, heretofore unknown, awoke within me and—­everything must be told—­I longed for his wooing and his embrace, I also felt that our union could take root and put forth blossoms only in the full harmony of our mutual love for God and the Saviour.  And though since the mass for the dead was celebrated for my mother—­it wounded me, and defiance and the wish to punish him urged me to put the convent walls between us—­no further token of his love has come, though I know as well as you that he desired to quit the world, this by no means impairs—­nay, it only strengthens—­the confidence I feel that our souls belong to one another as inseparably as though the sacrament had hallowed our union.