"I dared not confess my heresy to the beloved one; perhaps she would have turned angrily away from me for ever, and I could justify my silence, because I too had moments in which I could join in my spiritual bride's fervent prayers, but they were merely moments. My internal estrangement from the faith of the elect community increased. I only ventured to express the faintest doubts, then she looked at me with an expression of infinite love; her large tender eye rested upon me with such soul-felt meaning; verily her love for me was different from mine for her: she appeared to watch over my whole life, she felt that we must all be prepared to welcome the coming hour of the Millennium; atonement, forgiveness, purification spoke from out her looks, infinite desire to rescue, to sanctify the sinner. "I came frequently, I came daily; she withheld all tokens which love demands, although her saintly eyes expressed an increasing, more intense emotion. I became a hypocrite, I required these tokens in the name of salvation, of spiritual exercises; could my spiritual bride deny me them? "Serious and devout conversations must accompany the work of sanctification. "She urged me with great sternness, and blamed my lack of holy strength, when my eyes told more of passion than of sacred self-conquest; yet her eyes, too, were not always so stern as her words; sometimes they were filled with a tenderness the eloquence of which was very different from that which flowed from her lips; it was as if they would atone for the unavoidably harsh word which sacred duty imposed; yes this word, too, lost its victorious decision, it quivered with internal conflict, and sometimes she closed her weary eye, and tears hung on her eyelashes. "It was on a quiet evening, we alone as usual; I came overwhelmed with conflicting feelings, because I was wanting in all the qualifications of a hypocrite; my heart rebelled against the opposition which threatened to destroy my life. "The wings of the windmill went round beneath the evening sky; it seemed like a mockery of all my thoughts and deeds, that everlasting monotony of the beating of wooden wings, that interminable game of those arms stretching out in vain. "I was more daring, she softer than usual; she would even on that day deny me the right of devout exercise. Then I assumed the stern tone of a spiritual bridegroom, and she obeyed hesitatingly; the spirit of grace seemed to have left her, she seemed to be seized with a tremor before the might of passion, with rapture into which her own beauty transported her. And, indeed, I thought her more beautiful than ever on that day; pious words died upon her lips; I covered them with glowing kisses, and folded her in my arms. "The spiritual bride had become a mortal woman, the grey ashes of penitence had been wafted away by all the winds of heaven, and the Vulcan of earthly affection had obstructed the Paradise of those Saints with red-hot lava.