Twas you, my Gerald, who said, 'Let
there be light, and there was light.'"

"Hush, hush, sweet love," he said. "Your words would make me too near
God's self."

"Sure Love is God," she cried, her hands upon his shoulders, her face
uplifted. "What else? Love we know; Love we worship and kneel to; Love
conquers us and gives us Heaven. Until I knew it, I believed naught. Now
I kneel each night and pray, and pray, but to be pardoned and made
worthy."

Never before, it was true, had she knelt and prayed, but from this time
no nun in her convent knelt oftener or prayed more ardently, and her
prayer was ever that the past might be forgiven her, the future blessed,
and she taught how to so live that there should be no faintest shadow in
the years to come.

"I know not What is above me," she said. "I cannot lie and say I love It
and believe, but if there is aught, sure It must be a power which is
great, else had the world not been so strange a thing, and I--and those
who live in it--and if He made us, He must know He is to blame when He
has made us weak or evil. And He must understand why we have been so
made, and when we throw ourselves into the dust before Him, and pray for
help and pardon, surely--surely He will lend an ear! We know naught, we
have been told naught; we have but an old book which has been handed down
through strange hands and strange tongues, and may be but poor history.
We have so little, and we are threatened so; but for love's sake I will
pray the poor prayers we are given, and for love's sake there is no dust
too low for me to lie in while I plead."

This was the strange truth--though 'twas not so strange if the world
feared not to admit such things--that through her Gerald, who was but
noble and high-souled man, she was led to bow before God's throne as the
humblest and holiest saint bows, though she had not learned belief and
only had learned love.

"But life lasts so short a while," she said to Osmonde. "It seems so
short when it is spent in such joy as this; and when the day comes--for,
oh! Gerald, my soul sees it already--when the day comes that I kneel by
your bedside and see your eyes close, or you kneel by mine, it _must_ be
that the one who waits behind shall know the parting is not all."

"It could not be all, beloved," Osmonde said. "Love is sure, eternal."

Often in these blissful hours her way was almost like a child's, she was
so tender and so clinging. At times her beauteo