"My love! my love!" he breathed. "My life! my life and soul!" "My Gerald!" she cried. "My Gerald--let me say it on your breast a thousand times!" "My wife!" he said--"so soon my wife and all my own until life's end." "Nay, nay," she cried, her cheek pressed to his own, "through all eternity, for Love's life knows no end." As it had seemed to her poor lord who had died, so it seemed to this man who lived and so worshipped her--that the wonder of her sweetness was a thing to marvel at with passionate reverence. Being a man of greater mind and poetic imagination than Dunstanwolde, and being himself adored by her, as that poor gentleman had not had the good fortune to be, he had ten thousand-fold the power and reason to see the tender radiance of her. As she was taller than other women, so her love seemed higher and greater, and as free from any touch of earthly poverty of feeling as her beauty was from any flaw. In it there could be no doubt, no pride; it could be bounded by no limit, measured by no rule, its depths sounded by no plummet. His very soul was touched by her great longing to give to him the feeling, and to feel herself, that from the hour that she had become his, her past life was a thing blotted out. "I am a new created thing," she said; "until you called me 'Love' I had no life! All before was darkness. '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."