"O my Lydia, thou anointest me with thy forgiveness, and clothest me in the holy garment of thy love! Blessed am I and consecrated!" "I believed in thy wisdom, love!" "I had no wisdom but love!" "The Lord heard me, my Marsyas, for I was near mine extremity, and I could not have endured much longer!" "I had reached my extremity, Lydia, and then the Lord gave me His hand." She turned him toward the light, and gazed up at his eyes with such earnestness, such penetration on her almost infantile face, that he pressed her closer to him and laughed a low laugh. Her eyes flashed on him a light of new interest. "I never heard thee laugh till now!" she exclaimed. "I never was happy till now!" "Why now, and not before?" she asked. There was silence; he could not tell her why he had changed, but he could tell what had marked it. He led her to the chair she had left, and when she had sat, dropped at her feet and crossed his arms upon her lap. "Listen, and when I have done, know that the Lord loved us, and hath joined us with His own hands." Beginning at the time when he turned to find her gone from the reader's stone before the Synagogue in Alexandria, he told with simple directness of his wanderings, of his disappointments, of his growing fear that he would not save her from Saul. He had her follow him to the Temple, where he met Eleazar and received the dire news that Saul had departed for Damascus; and thence along the old Roman road through the length of the Holy Land, up past his native hills and the waters of the Sea of Galilee, and the marshes of Lake Huleh, into the desert, and on to the beginning of the beneficence of the Pharbar and the Abana, until he brought up within sixty paces of Saul at the wayside pool. All these things she heard with the sympathetic interest which had won him to her from the talk in the dawn on the housetop in Alexandria. But when he came to the supernatural visit of the great light, and the prostration of Saul and his own arising a man of subdued and sweetened nature, her eyes shone with a repressed excitement that was not usual in her. "Naught but a miracle could have stopped me then; naught but the same interference could turn me again into the old way!" She lifted his face and spoke to him with deep seriousness. "Didst thou hear what the Spirit said?" she asked. "We heard nothing, except Saul's words, which I told thee." "And did Saul make thee a promise that he would persecute no more, or beg thy compassion or thy forgiveness for his work against thy Stephen?" "He did not speak; he did not know me, for he was blind, and as one in a trance!" "And thou hast withdrawn thy hand from him, and forsworn thine oath against him?" "I have done that thing, Lydia." She held fast to her composure, but her face was transfigured.