irit, and to her imagination
concentrated on this regard of him every hour seemed to make his
solitude more terrible. Of her own religion she did not think, and
Monica's anxiety about their agreement after marriage was without the
least hint of danger. The possibility of any one's, even Guy's,
influencing her own faith was inconceivable; nor was she at all occupied
with her own disappointment at not finding Guy constant to her belief in
him. Pauline's one grief was for him, that now when things were going
badly he should be without spiritual hope. Suddenly her warm bed seemed
to her wrong and luxurious in comparison with the chill darkness she
imagined about Guy's soul at this moment. Impulsively she threw back the
sheets and knelt down beside the bed to pray for his peace. So vividly
was she conscious of the need for prayer that she was carried to
undreamed-of heights of supplication, to strange summits whereon it
seemed that if she could not pray she would never know how to pray
again. Ordinarily her devotions had been but a beautiful and simple end
or beginning of the day; they were associated with the early warmth of
the sunlight or with the gentle flutters of roosting birds; they were
the comforting and tangible pledges of a childhood not yet utterly
departed. Now the fires and ecstasies of a more searching faith had
seized Pauline. No longer did there pass before her eyes a procession of
gay-habited saints, glad celestial creatures that smiled down upon her
from a paradise not much farther away than the Rectory garden; no longer
did she find herself surrounded by the well-loved figures who when death
took her to them would hold out their arms in actual welcome and whom
she would recognize one by one. To-night these visions were
uncapturable, and beyond the darkness they had forsaken stretched a
terrifying void and beyond the void was nothing but light that seemed to
have the power of thinking, "I am Truth!" A speck in that void she saw
Guy spinning away from her, and it seemed that unless she prayed he
would be spun irremediably out of her consciousness. It seemed that the
fierceness of her prayer was like the fierceness of a flame that was
granted the power to sustain him, for when sometimes the tongues of fire
languished Guy would sink so far that only by summoning fresh force from
the light beyond could she bring him back. Gradually, however, her power
was waning, and with whatever desperate force she prayed he c