He dropped her hands and smiled at her, the smile she might have seen with the eyes of her soul upon the face of her angel guardian. “There is no more for us to say _now_,” he said, “but to pray for each other. By-and-by we shall have time to see what this means—this you and I being but one soul.” She rose and kept her eyes steadily fixed upon him. Then she slowly walked to the door. How slowly she passed from the room he never knew. Their eyes dwelt upon each other, and till she was gone he felt that never, even in infinite glory, could they be more really wedded than now. The door was half open. The room was empty, save for himself and the shadows. The hall-door was gently shut. He heard the sound of carriage-wheels. All was over! He sat down stupefied. This dead future which loomed blankly before him was stupefying—a dense blackness, a hopeless nothingness. The hours passed. The lamp flickered and went out. Still he sat there gazing at vacancy, his mind groping about in this dreary cloud of fathomless misery. He thought nothing tangible, felt neither cold nor fatigue. At last he began to wonder vaguely whether this was all that really existed—this dull, senseless apathy. As he began to wonder, his attention was attracted by a brilliant speck of light at his feet. Tiny at first, it seemed to grow larger and brighter as he looked. A mere pin’s-point of light at first, in a few minutes it was a disc of some size. Then he saw an object he knew well—a steel urn at the end of his library fender. With a flush of pain, he was alive again; alive, conscious of anguish, of separation from her, his darling, his adored. He seemed to see her retreating from him, steadily, hopelessly. With a cry, he sprang up. That light was a mocking sunbeam. He saw it now, creeping in between the shutters. He went to the window, he flung open the shutters and defied the day, or would have defied it. But he was face to face with the glory of the sunrise. The whole sky was golden, and crimson clouds floated upward, stately attendants upon the magnificence of the young day. Soft, white rounded masses were like smiles upon the clear blue sky: all meant life and hope and love. And as he gazed he felt abashed at his own littleness. What was he but a speck upon the bosom of the earth? That little steel urn was greater in the shine of the world’s sun than was he in the Light that streams from the Eternal. “I must reach it,” he told himself. “I must be more than a speck of dust. What is suffering, what is dull commonplace, but the ladder by which we climb to immortality?” That was his crucial hour, the bridge over which he passed from unrest to peace. None who knew him ever guessed the secret motives of his afterlife. They thought him more energetic, larger-minded, gentler, and more sympathetic. But he was envied as a man who seemed to have fathomed the mystery of “peace on earth.”