ginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob with
energy, with stored-up power aching to be used--and some day it will be
electricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! As
yet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless,
invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown--as unknown as God!--and
almost as mysterious!"

"Oh!" she reproved.

"I've sometimes wondered if those lightning flashes and those terrifying
things that used to fill the temples in the Eleusinian Mysteries didn't
simply mean that those old priests of Apollo knew more about electric
currents than we imagine."

"And even Jove's bolts were only electricity, weren't they?" she
assented. "So you're right, in a way--their god and their power _were_
electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!"

"No, it's older than Prometheus, it's older than Adam, it's mixed up in
some way with the very origin of life itself! It's the most mysterious
thing in the world--and the most beautiful!" he concluded, with solemn
conviction.

They walked on in silence for a moment or two. A dead leaf fell and
drifted between them. The afternoon deepened into twilight.

"O, Jim, not the most beautiful!" said Frank, suddenly, thrilled and
shaken with some wayward passion of gratitude, as acute as it was
unheralded.

He looked down at her, puzzled.

"Oh, I'm glad, Jim; glad!" she cried, irrelevantly.

"Glad for what?"

"For this--for you--for everything!"

His face clouded a little, for a moment, with the shadow of the past that
could and would not be altogether past.

"I thought we'd decided to let that--stay closed?" he said. There was a
note of reproof in his voice.

"Do you know what _I_ think is the most beautiful thing in all the world,
Jim?" she went on, as irrelevantly as before, but holding his arm still
more tightly entangled in hers. "I think it's Redemption!"

"Redemption?"

"Yes--I think there's nothing ever done, or made, or written of, or sung
of by poets, more beautiful than a soul, a poor, unhappy human soul,
coming into its own once more! Oh, I don't believe I can ever make you
feel it as I feel it--but I don't believe there's an adventure or a
movement in all life more beautiful than the rehabilitation--that's the
only word I can use!--of a man's heart, or a woman's! Think of it,
Jim!--what can be lovelier than the restoration of sanity and beauty and
meaning to a suffering and tortur