"Oh, my love, my love!" he cried. "It is I, it is I, who have come over the distant seas, who have travelled through sun and shade, through storm and calm, who have passed through the Shadow of Death to reach the heaven of thy face; look at me with thy awakening eyes, and tell me that life is sweet." "Life!" said the girl, her two hands still tightly clutching at her pulsing heart. "Life, what is Life?" "Life," cried Eric, "is contained in this one hour of perfect attainment. Life is the great promise of love fulfilled. Life is the sacred moment when my arms may clasp thee to my thirsting soul! "Come, my beloved, for I have waited so cruelly long, so tirelessly have I searched and yearned!" Stella, moved by some unknown, mysterious force, timidly drew near to this stranger man, whose face was as fair as the angels with whom in her visions she had always dwelt. But what was this waking joy--this tumultuous tide of intensest bliss? Something too strong, too strong, something that no living mortal could bear.... And yet now she lay within his passionate arms, her head hidden against his throbbing straining heart. In an agony of delight no words can describe, his lips, his warm living lips, were drinking her very soul away--drawing by slow degrees her sweet hardly-dawning life to mix with his boundless need. He knew that this was the ultimate limit of his soul's desire, a moment of such incommensurable joy, that body and soul flowed together into a sunrise of dazzling triumph. All that had been, was as if it had never existed. Past, present, and future were caught up and welded together into a blaze of unearthly rapture. He felt that he was being carried by the eternal wings of creation into the very heart of the throbbing world; he was one with Nature, he was one with God, one with his whole being's most sacred longing. And thus, closely locked in each other's arms, these two mortals of perfect beauty lived an hour that lies as a pulsing memory, deeply hidden within the dark lap of the ever-wakeful Mother Earth, and from which it rose like a song of undying, eternal perfection to the vastness of the sky above: a song that now floats in never-ending echoes on every passing cloud, on every ray of the sun. It was an hour when Nature stood still to listen to the accomplishment of one of her dearest dreams--when all life seemed concentrated within the happiness of those two frail human beings.... A cold streak of dawn was slowly advancing with pale furtiveness out of the cover of night, when Eric bent once again to press his lips upon the perfect mouth; as he did so Stella looked up into his face with those eyes that had for so long been a living part of his most hidden self. Oh! was ever any earthly thing so marvellous, so wonderful, as those two grey stars of light! and a sweet whisper rose stealing into every drop of his blood: