We stood aside in reverence. Martha Moon's eyes glowed, but she manifested no surprise. John and I stared in utter bewilderment. The two embraced each other, kissed and hugged and patted each other, wept and murmured and laughed, then all at once, with one great sigh between them, grew aware of witnesses. They were too happy to blush, yet indeed they could not have blushed, so red were they with the fire of heaven's own delight. Utterly unembarrassed they turned toward us--and then came a fresh astonishment, an old and new joy together out of the treasure of the divine house-holder: the uncle of the mirror, radiant with a joy such as I had never before beheld upon human countenance, came straight to me, cried; “Ah, little one!” took me in his arms, and embraced me with all the old tenderness. Then I knew that my own old uncle was the same as ever I had known him, the same as when I used to go to sleep in his arms. The jubilation that followed, it is impossible for me to describe; and my husband, who approves of all I have yet written, begs me not to attempt an adumbration of it. “It would be a pity,” he says, “to end a won race with a tumble down at the post!” CHAPTER XXXIII. HALF ONE IS ONE. I am going to give you the whole story, but not this moment; I want to talk a little first. I need not say that I had twin uncles. They were but one man to the world; to themselves only were they a veritable two. The word _twin_ means one of two that once were one. To _twin_ means to _divide_, they tell me. The opposite action is, of _twain_ to make one. To me as well as the world, I believe, but for the close individual contact of all my life with my uncle Edward, the two would have been but as one man. I hardly know that I felt any richer at first for having two uncles; it was long before I should have felt much poorer for the loss of uncle Edmund. Uncle Edward was to me the substance of which uncle Edmund was the shadow. But at length I learned to love him dearly through perceiving how dearly my own uncle loved him. I loved the one because he was what he was, the other because he was not that one. Creative Love commonly differentiates that it may unite; in the case of my uncles it seemed only to have divided that it might unite. I am hardly intelligible to myself; in my mind at least I have got into a bog of confused metaphysics, out of which it is time I scrambled. What I would say is this--that what made the world not care there should be two of them, made the earth a heaven to those two. By their not being one, they were able to love, and so were one. Like twin planets they revolved around each other, and in a common orbit around God their sun. It was a beautiful thing to see how uncle Edmund revived and expanded in the light of his brother's presence, until he grew plainly himself. He had suffered more than my own uncle, and had not had an orphan child to love and be loved by.