If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain;
They little know the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Personally I must confess to one small weakness. I cannot help thinking that the souls toward whom we feel drawn in this life are the very souls whom we knew and loved in a former life, and that the souls who repel us here, we do not know why, are the souls that earned our disapproval, the souls from whom we kept aloof in a former life.
—F. Max Müller.
Months on swift wing slipped away. Cartice’s pen was busy every day, and every day she delighted more and more in her work, because she was saying what she wished to say, was expressing herself fearlessly and freely. New plans of action fairly rioted in her brain. Plans! When had they ever worked for her?
There are persons who mark out everything ahead, and Fate lets them live their arrangements to the letter, but Cartice was not one of them.
The lamp of the spirit, which tells unutterable things, now burned in her eyes, with an unearthly brightness, throwing its touching radiance over all her words and deeds; but she did not understand. She alone saw not the heavenly illumination.
But one day the imminent change was made plain to her, though how she never told. Coming to Lilla, with whitened face, and the old-time, all-compelling appeal in her eyes, which neither man nor woman could see without a bursting heart, she said:
“I must soon leave you. It has been shown me and I understand.”
Under the spell of the wordless pain in the glorious eyes, her heroic friend flung her arms about her, crying, “Cartice! Cartice! My dear one! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” And together they wept tears of such anguish as only the strong ever weep.
For a few days the heart-breaking look continued in Cartice’s eyes; but in the silence of the night help came from the great source, and she got up one morning with peace shining in her face.
“Often in the past,” she said to Lilla, “I have wished I could die and be out of trouble. But now I want to live: now I know that dying doesn’t put us out of trouble. We must grow out of it by evolving above it, learning to master it.