trembled the rising light of a dawning love. The lips moved and the
voice spoke, not as it had spoken to her lately, but in tones long
familiar to her in dreams by day and night.

"I am he, I am that love for whom you have waited; you are that dear one
whom I have long sought throughout the world. The hour of our joy has
struck, the new life begins to-day, and there shall be no end."

Unorna's arms went out to grasp the shadow, and she drew it to her in
her fancy and kissed its radiant face.

"To ages of ages!" she cried.

Then she covered her eyes as though to impress the sight they had seen
upon the mind within, and groping blindly for her chair sank back
into her seat. But the mechanical effort of will and memory could not
preserve the image. In spite of all inward concentration of thought,
its colours faded, its outlines trembled, grew faint and vanished, and
darkness was in its place. Unorna's hand dropped to her side, and a
quick throb of pain stabbed her through and through, agonising as the
wound of a blunt and jagged knife, though it was gone almost before she
knew where she had felt it. Then her eyes flashed with unlike fires, the
one dark and passionate as the light of a black diamond, the other keen
and daring as the gleam of blue steel in the sun.

"Ah, but I will!" she exclaimed. "And what I will--shall be."

As though she were satisfied with the promise thus made to herself, she
smiled, her eyelids drooped, the tension of her frame was relaxed, and
she sank again into the indolent attitude in which the Wanderer had