"Try to think of yourself in the wilderness and that divine Shepherd seeking for you," said the priest gently. But Father Cyprian, with all his gifts, could not win her to confide in him. It was only to Francis Symeon, the spiritualist, that she ever spoke of the thoughts that filled her mind, as she sat alone in the room that had been her husband's, dreaming over one of the books he had loved. Her intimacy with Francis Symeon had grown closer since the world outside that quiet room had closed upon her for ever, since he knew and she knew that the transition from the known to the unknown life was very near. He had told her the story of his own sorrows, the tragedy of love and death that had made him a mystic and a dreamer, whose hopes and convictions the world scoffed at. Life had given him all the things he desired, and last, best gift of all, the love of a perfect woman, who alone could make that life complete for himself and for others, lifting him for ever above the sphere of sensual joys and worthless ambitions. It was she who had taught him to look beyond the present life, and to consider the beauty of the world no more than a screen that concealed the glory of diviner worlds, hidden from them only while they were moving along their earthly pilgrimage, always looking beyond, always dreaming of something better. The day came, without an hour's warning, when he was to be told that her pilgrimage was nearly done. The after-life was calling her. The divine companions were beckoning. All that there had been of high enthusiasm and scorn of life left him in that moment. He was as weak and helpless as a mother with her only child, her infant child threatened by death. The dreamer was no more a dreamer; and only the earthly lover remained, he who was to have been her husband. He hung upon moments, he listened to every failing breath, he counted time by her ebbing strength and the opinions of doctors. He lived only to watch and to listen beside her sofa, or in the curtained twilight of her sick room, when the pretty garden-parlour was no longer possible. Wherever she was carried in the vain pursuit of life he went with her. The time of alternating hope and dread lasted nearly a year.