"Yes, Lilian, on that evening--"

"I saw you also, but in my vision--yonder, far in the deeps of
space,--and--and my heart was stirred as it had never been before; and
near where your image grew out from the cloud I saw my father's face, and
I heard his voice, not in my ear, but as in my heart, whispering--"

"Yes, Lilian--whispering--what?"

"These words,--only these,--'Ye will need one another.' But then,
suddenly, between my upward eyes and the two forms they had beheld, there
rose from the earth, obscuring the skies, a vague, dusky vapour, undulous,
and coiling like a vast serpent,--nothing, indeed, of its shape and
figure definite, but of its face one abrupt glare; a flash from two dread
luminous eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa's, changing, more rapidly
than I could have drawn breath, into a grinning skull. Then my terror
made me bow my head, and when I raised it again, all that I had seen was
vanished. But the terror still remained, even when I felt my mother's arm
round me and heard her voice. And then, when I entered the house, and sat
down again alone, the recollection of what I had seen--those eyes, that
face, that skull--grew on me stronger and stronger till I fainted, and
remember no more, until my eyes, opening, saw you by my side, and in my
wonder there was not terror. No, a sense of joy, protection, hope, yet
still shadowed by a kind of fear or awe, in recognizing the countenance
which had gleamed on me from the skies before the dark vapour had risen,
and while my father's voice had murmured, 'Ye will need one another.' And
now--and now--will you love me less that you know a secret in my being
which I have told to no other,--cannot construe to myself? Only--only,
at least, do not mock me; do not disbelieve me! Nay, turn from me no
longer now: now I ask to meet your eyes. Now, before our hands can join