By what soft and unsuspected degrees my feeling of congenial friendship grew into a deeper devotion I cannot now trace. It must now in my miserable loneliness be enough to say that so it was. Only a few days ago—and yet the day seems already to belong to a remote past, and to be separated from these last dark hours by a great gulf, misty, not to be passed,—I realised that a new power had come into my life—the heavenly power that makes all things new. I had gone down to the cottage in a hot, breathless sunlight afternoon. I had long passed the formality of ringing to announce my entrance. There was no one in the little drawing-room, which was cool and dark, with shuttered windows. I went out upon the lawn. Miss Waring was sitting in a chair under a beech tree reading, and at the sight of me she rose, laid down her book, and came smiling across the grass. There is a subtle, viewless message of the spirit which flashes between kindred souls, in front of and beyond the power of look or speech, and at the same moment that I understood I felt she understood too. I could not then at once put into words my hopes; but it hardly seemed necessary. We sat together, we spoke a little, but were mostly silent in some secret interchange of spirit. That afternoon my heart climbed, as it were, a great height, and saw from a Pisgah top the familiar land at its feet, all lit with a holy radiance, and then turning, saw, in golden gleams and purple haze, the margins of an unknown sea stretching out beyond the sunset to the very limits of the world. 35 _Sep. 19, 1900._ That night, in a kind of rapturous peace, I faced the new hope. Even then, in that august hour, I reflected whether I could, with my broken life and faded dreams, link a spirit so fair to mine. I can truthfully say that I was full to the brim of the intensest gratitude, the tenderest service; but I thought was it just, was it right, with little or nothing to offer, to seek to make so large a claim upon so beautiful a soul? I did not doubt that I could win it, and that love would be lavished in fullest measure to me. But I strove with all my might to see whether such a hope was not on my part a piece of supreme and shameful selfishness. I probed the very depths of my being, and decided that I might dare; that God had given me this precious, this adorable gift, and that I might consecrate my life and heart to love and be worthy of it if I could. So I sank to sleep, and woke to the shock of a rapture such as I did not believe this world could hold. It was a still warm day of late summer, but a diviner radiance lay over garden, field, and wood for me. I determined I would not speak to my mother till after I had received my answer.