The brilliant morning light came through the most beautiful windows I have ever seen, even in our finest cathedrals. The large central stained glasses were studded round with prisms that played extraordinary pranks with the sunbeams, which, as they glanced from them, were splintered into a thousand scintillating bits, as splendid as jewels. We sat down, I filled--I do not know why--with a curious sense of expectancy that was half awe. Across one end of the great room was stretched a superb curtain of tapestry,--a mosaic in silk and wool. Severnius did not make any other sign or gesture to me except the one that bade me be seated. I watched him wonderingly but furtively. He seemed to be composing himself, as I have seen saintly people compose themselves in church. Not that he was saintly; he did not strike me as being that kind of a man, though there was that about him which proclaimed him to be a good man, whose friendship would be a valuable acquisition. He folded his hands loosely in his lap and sat motionless, his glance resting serenely on one of the great windows for a time and then passing on to other objects equally beautiful. We were still enwrapped in this august silence when I became conscious that somewhere, afar off, beyond the tapestry curtain, there were stealing toward us strains of unusual, ineffable music, tantalizingly sweet and vague. Gradually the almost indistinguishable sounds detached themselves from, and rose above, the pulsing silence,--or that unappreciable harmony we call silence,--and swelled up among the arches that ribbed the lofty ceiling, and rolled and reverberated through the great dome above, and came reflected down to us in refined and sublimated undulations. Our souls--my soul,--in this new wonder and ecstasy I forgot Severnius,--awoke in responsive raptures, inconceivably thrilling and exalted. I did not need to be told that it was sacred music, it invoked the Divine Presence unmistakably. No influence that had ever before been trained upon my spiritual senses had so compelled to adoration of the Supreme One who holds and rules all worlds. "He lifts me to the golden doors; The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strows her lights below, And deepens on and up! the gates Roll back. * * * *" This I murmured, and texts of our scriptures, and fragments of anthems. It was as if I brought my earthly tribute to lay on this Marsian shrine. The gates did roll back, the heavens were broken up, new spiritual heights were shown to me, up which my spirit mounted. I looked at Severnius. His eyes were closed. His face, lighted as by an inner illumination, and his whole attitude, suggested a "waiting upon God," that "Intercourse divine, Which God permits, ordains, across the line." There stole insensibly upon the sound-burdened air, the hallowed perfume of burning incense.