"Oh, no! I am supremely happy."
"Supremely happy," he echoed, jealously; "supremely happy, though separated from me! and yet you term your love for me divine!"
"It is divine, divine as all things heavenly are. For the perfecting of such love as mine the evidence of the senses is not requisite; indeed, it would prove antagonistic. Your earthly eyes are blind; but from my vision have fallen away the scales, which fact renders my spiritual sight clairvoyant. I can see you at all times, and can be with you with the celerity of the birth of thought. Where then, in what resides the separation for me?"
"For you!" he cried, passionately; "ay, but for me! I am blind; these mortal scales are upon my eyes, I am not clairvoyant. The wings of thought refuse to raise me above this present slough of despond into which I have fallen; they flutter with me back among the memories of the dead past, but that is all! I am still living in the flesh, and heaven knows that this bitter separation is a reality to me!"
Thereupon ensued a momentary silence, which was ere long ruptured by the low, gentle voice.
"Loyd," it whispered, "you bind me to earth; your love fetters my spirit!"
"If your love were unchanged," he murmured, disconsolately, "there would be no bondage in such magnetism!"
"My love, having been spiritualized, is far more absorbing than ever it was."
"Then why should you complain that the attraction of my love binds you to earth? If it is the spirit of my wife that addresses me at this moment, as you pretend, if your love for me is greater and purer than it was upon earth—which, as God is my judge, I can scarcely credit—why should you not be happier in this sphere, where I am, than in the realm of heaven?"
"Simply because it is not heaven here."