"They were these: 'What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?'"
"There would be everything in the answers," Guido said, "for they are big questions. I think I have answered them all in the negative in my own life. I know nothing, I do nothing, and I hope nothing."
Cecilia looked at him again. "I would not be you," she said gravely. "I can do nothing, perhaps, and I am sure I know nothing worth knowing, but I hope. I have that at least. I hope everything, with all my heart and soul—everything, even things you could not dream of."
"Help me to dream of them. Perhaps I might."
"Then dream that faith is knowledge, that charity is action, and that hope is heaven itself," answered Cecilia.
Her voice was sweet and low, and far away as spirit land, and Guido wondered at the words.
"Where did you hear that?" he asked.
"Ah, where?" she asked, almost sadly, and very longingly. "If I could tell you that, I should know the great secret, the only secret ever yet worth knowing. Where have we heard the voices that come back to us, not in sleeping dreams only, but when we are waking, too, voices that come back softly like evening bells across the sea, with the touch of hands that lay in ours long ago, and faces that we know better than our own! Where was it all, before the memory of it all was here?"
"I have often wondered whether those impressions are memories," said Guido.
"What else could they be?" Cecilia asked, her tone growing colder at once.