"I thank thee," I replied.
"You should never thank for love," she said, "for it is a gift that requires as much as it bestows."
"And yet they call thee crazed!" I said, and placed my hand upon her wild dishevelled hair.
"But you Quakers never show any feeling," she went on, "and I suppose you never love."
"Sometimes we do," said I.
She seemed to think I was made sorry by what she had spoken, for she started. "What am I saying?" she exclaimed, "when you have shown me more feeling than any one in the world; and maybe you love me a little."
"We should love our neighbors as ourselves."
"I want the stars," she began, weeping: "I want to reach them, to go to them, to have the light in my mind that is gone out of it up to them."
I could say nothing, for my want was something akin to hers.
Many a wild night had she now, and friend Afton and I had often but sad chances of keeping her within bounds: we had to watch her while she would stand and call out to the far-off lights in the sky; and as, like a prophet of old, she stood and repeated divine words of care and an all-seeing love, she was grown softer and gentler, and her speech seemed to come from one who understood what the words imparted to her hearers. She was fond of saying the Psalms of David, and would weep at the touching words of suffering, of joy and of exultation which that man, so many thousand years dead, had been wont to sing as perchance he stood as she now did, looking up to the same nightly skies and weeping as she now wept, as his words rang through the ever-settled calmness of the night, and had no answer borne to his ears, but only the quiet made even quieter by his sorrow or his joy.