Her sweet accents shook with a liquid thrill suggestive of tears, --but he was silent. It seemed to him that he would be well content to hold his place forever, if forever he might hear her thus melodiously speak on! Had she not called him her "other soul, her king, her immortality's completion!"--and on those wondrous words of hers his spirit hung, impassioned, dazzled, and entranced beyond all Time and Space and Nature and Experience!
After a brief pause, during which his ravished mind floated among the thousand images and vague feelings of a whole Past and Future merged in one splendid and celestial Present, she resumed, always softly and with the same exquisite tenderness of tone: "I left thee, Dearest, but a moment, ... and in that moment, He who hath himself shared in human sorrows and sympathies,--He who is the embodiment of the Essence of God's Love,--came to my aid. Plunging thy senses in deep sleep, as hath been done before to many a saint and prophet of old time here on this very field of Ardath,--he summoned up before thee the phantoms of a PORTION of thy Past, ... phantoms which, to thee, seemed far more real than the living presence of thy faithful Edris! ... alas, my Beloved! ... thou art not the only one on the Sorrowful Star who accepts a Dream for Reality and rejects Reality as a Dream!"
She paused again,--and again continued: "Nevertheless, in some degree thy Vision of Al-Kyris was true, inasmuch as thou wert shown therein as in a mirror, ONE phase, ONE only of thy former existence upon earth. The final episode was chosen,--as by the end of a man's days alone shall he be judged! As much as thy dreaming- sight was able to see,--as much as thy brain was able to bear, appeared before thee, ... but that thou, slumbering, wert yet a conscious Personality among Phantoms, and that these phantoms spoke to thee, charmed thee, bewildered thee, tempted thee, and swayed thee, . . this was the Divine Master's work upon thine own retrospective Thought and Memory. He gave the shadows of thy bygone life, seeming color, sense, motion, and speech,--He blotted out from thy remembrance His own Most Holy Name, . . and, shutting up the Present from thy gaze, He sent thy spirit back into the Past. There, thou, perplexed and sorrowful, didst painfully re- weave the last fragments of thy former history, . . and not till thou hadst abandoned the Shadow of Thyself, didst thou escape from the fear of destruction! Then, when apparently all alone, and utterly forsaken, a cloud of angels circled round thee, . . THEN, at thy first repentant cry for help, He who has never left an earnest prayer unanswered bade me descend hither, to waken and comfort thee! ... Oh, never was His bidding more joyously obeyed! Now I have plainly shown thee the interpretation of thy Dream, . . and dost thou not comprehend the intention of the Highest in manifesting it unto thee? Remember the words of God's Prophet of old: "'Behold the Field thou thoughtest barren, how great a glory hath the moon unveiled! "'And I beheld and was sore amazed, for I was no longer Myself, but Another "'And the sword of death was in that Other's soul,--and yet that Other was but Myself in pain "'And I knew not the things which were once familiar, and my heart failed within me for very fear!'"