All her prayers had arisen within the solicitude of tried-out conviction, a consciousness fraught with distrust in everything not wholly proven or self-satisfying, were invoked of a Being that she knew, One standing revealed in the light of His beneficence, not some unknown but hoped-for God, conjured as the result of a longing on her part to escape the heartless dark of earth's vain, momentary alternations. Follow that beacon--above the need or beneath the power of faith--she would; there could be no doubt in her mind as to His supremacy, Its ultimatum; but might she not for that, without overstepping the borders of a bidden track, nor any the less losing sight of her own true inspiration, might she not, in her flight toward an unalterably preconceived and self-attainable end so govern her steps that no conflict ensue with others bent on no less holy, yet more uncertain, grounds? The stars seemed whirling in space measured and adjusted to the balance of a perfect equilibrium; all the elements, no matter whether it be the rushing of the winds, or the rumblings of an avalanche, or the belching forth of fire and the downpourings of waters from heaven upon earth, each found in due time and with perfect accord its own properly allotted place or plan; the soul and the body lived their destined duality with no more positive dissolution than death itself scarce renders; the negative forces of earth and eternity, heaven or oblivion, were but the positive's own postulate, working out its never-ending, all-propelling grind toward an essential individuality, supreme and overreaching, whether wrought in the fiery evolutions of fate or suffered of an humbler, more easily gotten, commonly adapted belief, its godhead a trinity or as we please, and its doctrine but a faith or something less: why deny anything, anybody, or their pleasure? Jokoin had fully demonstrated the larger possibilities of any ordinary sort of real susceptibility, Oyea had suggested the temple as a more fitting place, and a particular one as the most likely of transmission if not remission, and Hideyoshi really made no outward protest against its individual use or secular purposes: there must be some strange potency hidden underneath the force of prayer wafted within the portals of a place guarded so sacredly and approached in faith. The church too, then, either temple or edifice, held its secret, perchance worked an instrumentality, no doubt brought compensations that she, in her lone environment, had failed to realize: the world demanded of her that she leave no thing undone, make every effort to resolve its higher blessing, and through that and that alone she must and could attain her own true ideality. Hideyoshi had, for all she knew or could surmise, done his part and faithfully.