"I, too," she said, "cherished such a love. But I am no theologian. Although my love of you had awakened my love of God, I thought it was wrong to go on cherishing it after its work was done. For years and years I thrust it away as a snare. I so crowded my waking hours with prayer and labor and study that no time was left for other thoughts. But, time after time--not thrice, or ten times, but five hundred--my nights have been rosy with the same wonderful dream. In my dream I seem to have entered into the bliss of heaven, and to be moving in the fullness of the love of God, as in a soft glory of life-giving golden light. At the beginning of my dream it is always a churchly heaven, pillared and domed, with holy chants drifting hither and thither like clouds of incense and with clouds of incense mounting upward like holy chants. But, little by little, it changes. The dim dome widens and brightens into a blue sky, with the smoke of the incense sailing in it like pearly clouds; and the stark pillars soften into tree trunks crowned with cool foliage and hung with clinging roses. Instead of rolling organs I hear the surf of a summer sea breaking on soft sand, and instead of the chants I hear the birds, and thousands of brooks ringing like little bells. Cool grass, gay with wild flowers, spreads itself in the place of golden streets and marble pavements. But, all the time, the same holy light is over it all, like the light before a summer sunset among green hills. Then I become conscious that the heaven I am walking in is not some strange unhomely land high above the stars. _Video cœlum novunt et terram novam_: 'I see a new heaven and a new earth,' and I know, with sudden joy, that I am walking in this beautiful world, made new, purged of evil and pain, and wholly conformed to the mind of God. "My dream unfolds always in the same way. Gradually I see that the woods in which I am walking are woods I have walked in before. The voices of the sea and the brooks are good to hear, because they are the voices of old friends. At last I push past a mimosa, on fire with golden flowers like a burning bush, and I halt on the margin of this pool. I wait, with the cascade rumbling at me like thunder and flashing at me like lightning. I turn round; and, without hearing your footfall, I find you at my side. Then we wander off together, sometimes down deep ravines, sometimes up through pines to brown moorlands purple with heather, sometimes along the banks of lakes and rivers, or along the sea-shore, with the holy light always over us and with God's love nearer to us than our own souls. That is my dream." After pausing a little, she added: