But she wanted to talk to him about it. "You see what it has meant to me? Why I loved it and lived for it? Oh doctor--I wanted to show that he was greater than all the great things he sought to do! The night this picture came to me it set my blood on fire, and at no moment since, no matter how tired or lonely or discouraged--have I lost my love for it--belief in it. It seems so right. It seems to stand for so many things. They call it a masterpiece of light--and isn't it fine--great--right, that Karl's portrait should be a masterpiece of light?" For a long time he was lost to it. It was as she said--right. To the blind man had come the light; to the man of science the light of truth, and to the human soul, about to set out on another journey, had come the perfect understanding of what had lighted the way for him here. When he turned to her at last she was looking at the picture with such love in her eyes as he had never seen. Her lips were parted--tremulous; there were tears upon her cheeks; her whole face quivered with love and longing. He saw then, in that one glance before he turned away, that time and death held no sway over such a love as this. "I did not mean to," she faltered. "But I have not seen the picture myself for a long time, and your being here--" She broke down there, and he summoned no word with which to answer her sobs. "Dr. Parkman,"--raising a passionate face--"I want you to know that if this were the greatest picture the world had ever seen--if it were a thousand times greater than anything the world had ever known--I would throw it away--obliterate it--gladly--joyously--for just one touch of Karl's hand!" "Yes," he murmured, more to himself than to her, "and if you were not like that you never could have done it." "What it cost!"--he heard her whisper. "What it _cost_!" He told her that it had ever been so. That the great things were paid for like that. That so many of the things which had lived longest and gone deepest had come from broken hearts and souls tried almost beyond their power for suffering. He told her that the future would accept this, as it had the others, without knowing of its cost, that a myriad of broken hearts had gone into the sum of the world's achievement. In the half hour which followed, as they sat there, speaking sometimes of Karl, more often silent, some things seemed to pass from the man's heart, other things to come. And as at the last he rose to go, for he felt she would like a little time alone, he said, and his face and his voice gave much which the words missed: "Ernestine, you have done more than you know. For me too--you have made it right." She sat a long time before her picture, dreaming of Karl. She whispered his name, and he seemed to answer with, "Liebchen--brave liebchen--you have been good to me."