, when you
first saw me, seated here--"

"Yes, Lilian, on that evening--"

"I saw you also, but in my vision--yonder, far in the deeps of
space,--and--and my heart was stirred as it had never been before; and
near where your image grew out from the cloud I saw my father's face,
and I heard his voice, not in my ear, but as in my heart, whispering--"

"Yes, Lilian--whispering--what?"

"These words,--only these,--'Ye will need one another.' But then,
suddenly, between my upward eyes and the two forms they had beheld,
there rose from the earth, obscuring the skies, a vague, dusky vapour,
undulous, and coiling like a vast serpent,--nothing, indeed, of its
shape and figure definite, but of its face one abrupt glare; a flash
from two dread luminous eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa's,
changing, more rapidly than I could have drawn breath, into a grinning
skull. Then my terror made me bow my head, and when I raised it again,
all that I had seen was vanished. But the terror still remained, even
when I felt my mother's arm round me and heard her voice. And then, when
I entered the house, and sat down again alone, the recollection of what
I had seen--those eyes, that face, that skull--grew on me stronger and
stronger till I fainted, and remember no more, until my eyes, opening,
saw you by my side, and in my wonder there was not terror. No, a sense
of joy, protection, hope, yet still shadowed by a kind of fear or awe,
in recognizing the countenance which had gleamed on me from the skies
before the dark vapour had risen, and while my father's voice had
murmured, 'Ye will need one another.' And now--and now--will you love
me less that you know a secret in my being which I have told to no
other,--cannot construe to myself? Only--only, at least, do not mock me;
do not disbelieve me! Nay, turn from me no longer now: now I ask to meet
your eyes. Now, before our hands can join again, tell me that you do not
despise me as untruthful, do not pity me as insane."

"Hush, hush!" I said, drawing her to my breast. "Of all you tell me
we will talk hereafter. The scales of our science have no weights fine
enough for the gossamer threads of a maiden's pure fancies. Enough for
me--for us both--if out from all such illusions start one truth, told
to you, lovely child, from the heavens; told to me, ruder man, on the
earth; repeated by each pulse of this heart that woos you to hear and
to trust,--now and henceforth through life unto death, '