"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!
Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."
But—Good Gracious!—thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding revelation, he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one. They had always known that they were one, united by some mystic Force which had its roots in a Far Beginning and its branches in the Eternities.
Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them and their united freedom?
"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."
He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a perfect description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract. (The woman in front of him would not stop sniffing.)
"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,
Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life...."
It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing neither to the left nor to the right, but this time she was not clinging to Peter.
With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound. The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his fingers could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn carpet, and so to his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the silence of catacombs.
The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night were no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he remembered, experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The knowledge formed another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one another.
In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands with her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter. Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped into an ante-room in search of whisky and soda.