And still the eyes—
It was again the moment of their betrothal, and God was with them as in the garden.
LATE in the moonlight, the tender moonlight of June, Milly sat alone by a grave. The soft night wind touched her face, the smell of countless budding flowers was around her. It was again the beautiful youth of the year, the time of love, and for her youth and love were done. Such a little while ago it seemed since she had been looking forward to it, and now it was done. Oh, what did it all mean, the love, the yearning, the striving, that it should end in such bitter loss; how had they made such a failure of marriage—marriage, that could have been so beautiful! Why was it that that last moment with Norton had been the first to show it to her?
In the utter solitude she thought and thought, with strained brow, with hands tightly clasped. She searched her soul as if it were the judgment day. Death held up the lamp by which she saw her husband at last clearly—all that he was, all that he might have been if she had not used her higher thought to build up a barrier between them. The sense of his maimed life, the loss of all the joy and trust there might have been, pierced her to the heart. His nature, lower than hers, had yet held in it the capacity to be more than hers—had seen more clearly, and had been more generous. Could it be that, after all, she who had loved so much had not loved enough?
Oh, what was it that was expected of love; to desire utterly the good of the best beloved, the development along lines where one cannot follow, on which one has no claim, which touch no answering chord of self—no one poor human being can love perfectly, as perfectly as that! If one were only God—
But there was God.
Milly raised her head, and the moonlight fell on her face.
“Oh, far beyond this poor horizon’s bound” shone the answer to all her thought. The capability of endless growth, the mating of two souls beyond the spheres and through all ages was the message of high emprise that called her like the voice of a star. With the heart of love, with the wings of immortality came the third revelation, reaching to infinite depths and heights, revealing the ineffable space where self is lost in the divine. The secret of life and death, of loss and reprisal, of the seen and the unseen, of thou and I, was there in the oneness of all that our mortal sense divides. Oh, the great, free, beautiful vision!