iet, gentle sleep: ease had dethroned pain, and order had begun to
dawn out of threatened chaos.

"Thank God!" he said, involuntarily, and stood up: what all that meant,
God only knows.

After various directions to Mrs. Puckridge, to which she seemed to
attend, but which, being as simple as necessary, I fear she forgot the
moment they were uttered, the doctor mounted, and rode away. The
darkness was gone, for the moon was rising, but when the road compelled
him to face her, she blinded him nearly as much. Slowly she rose through
a sky freckled with wavelets of cloud, and as she crept up amongst them
she brought them all out, in bluish, pearly, and opaline gray. Then,
suddenly almost, as it seemed, she left them, and walked up aloft,
drawing a thin veil around her as she ascended. All was so soft, so
sleepy, so vague, it seemed to Paul as he rode slowly along, himself
almost asleep, as if the Night had lost the blood he had caused to flow,
and the sweet exhaustion that followed had from the lady's brain
wandered out over Nature herself, as she sank, a lovelier Katadyomene,
into the hushed sea of pain-won repose.

Was he in love with her? I do not know. I could tell, if I knew what
being in love is. I think no two loves were ever the same since the
creation of the world. I know that something had passed from her eyes to
his--but what? He may have been in love with her already; but ere long
my reader may be more sure than I that he was not. The Maker of men
alone understands His awful mystery between the man and the woman. But
without it, frightful indeed as are some of its results, assuredly the
world He has made would burst its binding rings and fly asunder in
shards, leaving His spirit nothing to enter, no time to work His lovely
will.

It must be to any man a terrible thing to find himself in wild pain,
with no God of whom to entreat that his soul may not faint within him;
but to a man who can think as well as feel, it were a more terrible
thing still, to find himself afloat on the tide of a lovely passion,
with no God to whom to cry, accountable to Himself for that which He has
made. Will any man who has ever cast more than a glance into the
mysteries of his being, dare think himself sufficient to the ruling of
his nature? And if he rule it not, what shall he be but the sport of the
demons that will ride its tempests, that will rouse and torment its
ocean? What help then is there? What high-hearted man would conse