Again there was a pause of trancing silence, filled with the floating ghost of visionary music, keeping the sweet tradition of his words, and telling to the soul what music tells. Again around the lonely dwelling swelled the wind’s mysterious eolian sigh, rising in inarticulate wild prophecies, and wailing sombrely away. “Good night, good night,” he softly murmured, with a movement of departure. “Good night,” she answered, in a low and fervent voice, “friend, true and loving, good night.” A sense of heavenly tenderness rose trembling in their souls, and with meeting lips they were clasped in each other’s arms. Oh, solemn ecstasy of prayer and peace! Oh, mystic passion of a veiled true love! Was it a dream? She was alone. Standing in the solitary room, her brow bent upon her hand, the dim sweetness of the vision in her mind, she floated away in vague, delicious reverie. Soft light fled pulsing through her spirit; a sacred and passionless perfume floated in her brain; a celestial tenderness tranced her soul. He loved another; his love for her was the love of friend for friend—no more; but she was happier, holier, nobler to have inspired such love, and stronger than ever to resign him now, and to live her life alone. So thinking, like one lost in a blissful dream, she glided away to her pillow. Was it a dream? How strangely sweet and vague! He was wandering noiselessly down the shadowy street in the wan moonlight, with the cold air blowing on his cheek, as void of coldness as though he had been a phantom, and not a man. When had he left her—how? but his thoughts recalled only the peaceful passion of that moment, and between the lighted room and the moonlit street, there was a blank chasm. Dear moment, never to come again, dear magic flower that bloomed in the sad garden of his love, never to be renewed, yet sweetening life and life’s submissive sacrifice forever. Dear friend, true friend and sweet, whose clasp, whose sacred kiss—the first, the last—gave tokens of no earthly love, but rich memorials and previsions of the love that makes the hills of heaven more fair! So ran the voiceless music of his thought, while memory kept the phantom form of the beloved one in visioned light and odor. To-morrow he would meet her, and the day after, and on for many a day through months and years to come, but never again on the height of the ideal and intimate communion where their spirits had met and said farewell. Years hence, and she a happy wife and mother, how softly this hour would glide from the innermost holiest cloister of memory, and lend a more pensive and tender grace to her beauty, and shed a finer and more ethereal essence on her happiness! Consecrating her forever, its consecration would rest on his own life, pledging him more firmly to lofty and generous effort, and sanctifying all low toils and struggles as with the presence of an angel.