All at once it rushed upon her, filling her overwhelmingly. It said that there was a sea mightier than what she called the sea of fate; it told of a sea of human souls over which fate only seemed to prevail. A great rush of truth filled her with this--It was the belief in the omnipotence of fate which was the real delusion of the spirit. Over and over again, with steadily rising tide, it told her that,--no more to be reasoned away than the sea, resistless as the tide. She never knew in after years just what it was happened in that hour. She could not have told it, for it was not a thing for words to compass. But after that great truth had rushed full upon her, sweeping away the philosophy of her bitterness, Karl's spirit, something sent out from him to her, seemed to come in with the tide. He pleaded with her. He asked her to stop fighting and come back to the soul of things. He asked her to be Ernestine--his Ernestine. He told her that his own spirit could not find peace while hers was waging war and full of bitterness. He wanted her to make a place for them both in that great world-harmony of their belief. He told her that out where souls see in wider sweeps, they know that there is a spirit over which death and fate cannot prevail. Darkness came on, but she had no thought of fear. And before she turned away something had risen from the dead. Out of woe and despair, defeat and bitterness, out of loneliness and a broken heart, something was born again. Karl asked that she make it right with the world. Karl asked for a child of their love. And at the last it was the call of the child to the mother which she heard. It was the maternal instinct of the spirit which answered. Very late that night, after she had sat long at her window, looking up at the stars, waiting, a great light seemed to appear, and shimmering against the sky, high above the tides of the sea, she saw the picture which she would paint. CHAPTER XLII WORK THE SAVIOUR For more than three years then they saw nothing of Ernestine. She left this note for Georgia: "I am sorry to seem erratic, but I cannot wait for you. I am going away at once. I am going first to New York, and then, I think, to Paris. I am going to do something which I can do better there than anywhere else. Thank you, Georgia, for everything. It must be satisfying to feel one has succeeded as beautifully in anything as you have succeeded in being a friend to me. Do not worry. There is nothing now to worry about. You will be glad to know that I am going back to my work." A little later Dr. Parkman had this from her from New York: "I am sailing for Paris. I am going to work. I see it all now; all that you would have me see, and more. Some day I will try to show you just how well I see it. "I do not know how I am going to bear part of it--the going back where we were so happy. But I _will_ bear it, for nothing shall keep me from the work I see before me.