eastward from her window, he seemed ascending his lofty pulpit to preach
the story of the day named after him--the story of the Sun-day; the
rising again in splendor of the darkened and buried Sun of the universe,
with whom all the worlds and all their hearts and suns arose. A light
steam was floating up from the grass, and the raindrops were sparkling
everywhere. The day had arisen from the bosom of the night; peace and
graciousness from the bosom of the storm; she herself from the grave of
her sleep, over which had lain the turf of the darkness; and all was
fresh life and new hope. And through it all, reviving afresh with every
sign of Nature's universal law of birth, was the consciousness that her
life, her own self, was rising from the dead, was being new-born also.
She had not far to look back to the time when all was dull and dead in
her being: when the earthquake came, and the storm, and the fire; and
after them the still small voice, breathing rebuke, and hope, and
strength. Her whole world was now radiant with expectation. It was
through her husband the change had come to her, but he was not the rock
on which she built. For his sake she could go to hell--yea, cease to
exist; but there was One whom she loved more than him--the one One whose
love was the self-willed cause of all love, who from that love had sent
forth her husband and herself to love one another; whose heart was the
nest of their birth, the cradle of their growth, the rest of their
being. Yea, more than her husband she loved Him, her elder Brother, by
whom the Father had done it all, the Man who lived and died and rose
again so many hundred years ago. In Him, the perfect One, she hoped for
a perfect love to her husband, a perfect nature in herself. She knew how
Faber would have mocked at such a love, the very existence of whose
object she could not prove, how mocked at the notion that His life even
now was influencing hers. She knew how he would say it was merely love
and marriage that had wrought the change; but while she recognized them
as forces altogether divine, she knew that not only was the Son of Man