"Ah, that I cannot truly say. But I am so accustomed to obey the doctor implicitly that I did as he asked me and wear this amulet round my neck. He has always a reason for what he does, Alice. Remember, dear, he said plainly that our sunshine would not last for ever," ended Montrose gravely.
"There is to be a period of sorrow, I know," murmured Alice, nestling close to her lover's side. "But with Dr. Eberstein's help we shall come out of the darkness into the light once more. I don't know what he means," she added after a pause. "Why should sorrow come?"
"I have an idea that it has something to do with our meeting in former lives, Alice, and that we have enemies to encounter and conquer."
"Don Pablo very likely."
"I think so, although I am not sure." Montrose spoke dreamily, remembering his wonderful vision and the warning of Eberstein. "We must watch and pray, dear, for, more or less, we are moving in the darkness. This will aid us," and he held up the talisman, which glittered in the sunset rays.
"But how can that golden heart help?" asked Alice disbelievingly.
"You only see the exterior, dear. It holds," Montrose made the sign of the cross on his breast, "a portion of the Host, as Dr. Eberstein told me, and is therefore powerful against evil. I called it an amulet: rightly, I should have said a reliquary. Look, dearest!"
Then a most wonderful thing happened. The two had reached the shade of the wood surrounding Tremore, and had halted on its verge in a spot where the sunlight could not penetrate. But as Alice stared at the golden heart it blazed as a star with a far more brilliant light than any she had ever seen before. In a flash of thought she knew that her interior senses had been opened by the mightiest influence on earth. She was looking through the sheath of metal at the very Host itself in its supernal aspect, radiant, glorious, wonderful, holy. "Oh!" she breathed in a hushed voice and bowed her head reverently.
"What is it?" asked her lover in surprise, for her expression was angelic.
"Do you not see the light that is brighter than the sun?"