For many weeks Erica had scarcely a conscious interval. Now and then she had been dimly aware that Brian was in the room, or that Aunt Jean, and Mrs. MacNaughton, and her many secularist friends were nursing her; but all had been vague, dream-like, seen through the distorting fever-mist. On night, however, she woke after a sleep of many hours to see things once more as they really were. There was her little room with its green-paneled walls, and its familiar pictures, and familiar books. There was Aunt Jean sitting beside the fire, turning over the pages of an “Idol-Breaker,” while all the air seemed to be ringing and echoing with the sound of church bells.
“Auntie,” she said, “what day is it?”
Aunt Jean came at once to her bedside.
“It is New Year's day,” she said; “it struck twelve about five minutes ago, dear.”
Erica made no comment though the words brought back to her the sense of her desolation brought back to her, too, the remembrance of another New Year's day long ago when she had stood beside her father on the deck of the steamer, and the bells of Calais had gayly pealed in spite of her grief. She took the food her aunt brought her, and promised to go to sleep once more.
“I shall have to wake up again in this misery!” she thought to herself. “Oh, if one could only sleep right on!”
But God sometimes saves us from what we have most dreaded; and when at sunrise Erica woke once more, before any recollection returned to her mind, she became conscious of One who said to her, “Lo, I am with you always! Behold, I make all things new!”
Streaks of golden light were stealing in between the window curtains. She lay quite still, able to face life once more in the strength of that Inner Presence; able to endure the well-known sights and sounds because she could once more realize that there was One who made even “the wrath of man to praise” Him; who, out of blackest evil and cruelest pain, could at length bring good. Presently, passing from the restfulness of that conscious communion, she remembered a strange dream she had had that night.
She had dreamed that she was sitting with Donovan in the little church yard at Oakdene; in her hand she held a Greek Testament, but upon the page had only been able to see one sentence. It ran thus, “Until the times of the Restitution of all things.” Donovan had insisted that the word should rightly be “restoration.” She had clung to the old rendering. While they discussed the distinction between the words, a beautiful girl had all at once stood before them. Erica knew in an instant who it must be by the light which shone in her companion's face.
“You are quite right,” she had said, turning her beautiful eyes upon him. “It is not the mere giving back of things that were, it is the perfecting of that which was here only in ideal; it is the carrying out of what might have been. All the time there has been progress, all the time growth, and so restoration is better, wider, grander than anything we could dream of here!”