The fine weather had returned in all its summer glory, and she was lying on a couch in her own room near the window, whence she could gaze on the expanse of sea below, this morning streaked with the most delicate gradations of distance, sweep beyond sweep, line and band and ribbon of softly, often but slightly varied hue, leading the eyes on and on into the infinite. There may have been some atmospheric illusion ending off the show, for the last reaches mingled so with the air that you saw no horizon line, only a great breadth of border; no spot which could you appropriate with certainty either to sea or sky; while here and there was a vessel, to all appearance, pursuing its path in the sky, and not upon the sea. It was, as some of my readers will not require to be told, a still, gray forenoon, with a film of cloud over all the heavens, and many horizontal strata of deeper but varying density near the horizon. Mrs. Cromwell had lain for some time with her large eyes fixed on the farthest confusion of sea and sky. "I have been sending out my soul," she said at length, "to travel all across those distances, step by step, on to the gates of pearl. Who knows but that may be the path I must travel to meet the Bridegroom?" "The way is wide," I said: "what if you should miss him?" I spoke almost involuntarily. The style of her talk was very distasteful to me; and I had just been thinking of what I had once heard my father say, that at no time were people in more danger of being theatrical than when upon their death-beds. "No," she returned, with a smile of gentle superiority; "no: that cannot be. Is he not waiting for me? Has he not chosen me, and called me for his own? Is not my Jesus mine? I shall _not_ miss him. He waits to give me my new name, and clothe me in the garments of righteousness." As she spoke, she clasped her thin hands, and looked upwards with a radiant expression. Far as it was from me to hint, even in my own soul, that the Saviour was not hers, tenfold more hers than she was able to think, I could not at the same time but doubt whether her heart and soul and mind were as close to him as her words would indicate she thought they were. She could not be wrong in trusting him; but could she be right in her notion of the measure to which her union with him had been perfected? I could not help thinking that a little fear, soon to pass into reverence, might be to her a salutary thing. The fear, I thought, would heighten and deepen the love, and purify it from that self which haunted her whole consciousness, and of which she had not yet sickened, as one day she certainly must. "My lamp is burning," she said; "I feel it burning. I love my Lord. It would be false to say otherwise." "Are you sure you have oil enough in your vessel as well as in your lamp?" I said.