“O God, accept my humiliation!” She heard that tremulous prayer through her sobs, and, starting, looked at Dick. His face was bowed forward in his hands, as though he could never again raise it. She recollected herself. It was God who had cured and enlightened him. He was not a man who had turned from one fickle fancy to another. He was in the hands of God. She wiped her eyes, and, after a little while, went and knelt beside his chair. “Forgive me, Dick, for reproaching you so,” she said. “It is over now. We all make mistakes, and those only do well who acknowledge them, and forgive others. My childhood’s dear friend, let us forget all that is painful in the past. God will direct. There is much in life besides marrying and giving in marriage, and I do not wish to think of that again, not for a long, long time, if at all. Set the seal on the events of the last two years. They never happened. I am happy now. You know that, though I was born at the North, I have a Southern temper. See! the little cyclone is past, and I am clear from every cloud. We are two sober friends, who wish each other no end of good. Tell me what you mean to do.” He raised his head, and the one absorbing interest of his new life came back and obliterated the passing trouble. “I do not know, Edith, and I lay no plans. I have no reason to trust my own will or wish. I give myself up entirely to direction, and am certain on but one point: God will not let me go, and I will not let him go. When I lay bruised and helpless before him, he took me in his arms and healed me, and I will never know another love. He has kindled a fire in my heart which my life shall guard. I rejected him once, but will never again. That night I spent in the church, before my baptism, a voice from the altar asked me, I thought, to give up all for God; and it would have been easy then for me to promise. As I meditated on heaven, the Mother of Christ drew to herself all that is lovely in woman; all that was strong, and true, and protecting in a guide clustered around the church; all that was adorable, that passed beyond speech, was there before me in the tabernacle. I thought then that to be a brother in any religious order, or a servant in the church, to sleep under the same roof that sheltered the head of Christ, to light the candles, to care for his altar, to serve Mass, all that would be the highest honor and happiness. I think so now, but I ask nothing. I thought then with self-contempt how I had toiled to earn money, when the ‘inexhaustible riches of God’ had lain untouched at my hand; how I had travelled to see the wonders of the earth, when the wonders of God had appealed to me in vain. But when daylight came, I treated the whole as a dream, a mere exaltation of the fancy, and impracticable. I know now that what I took for a dream is the only reality, and what I thought reality is but a dream. I resisted the inspiration, and have been lacerated on the briers of my own obstinacy.”