After the experience related in the last chapter, I remained for some time in solitude. Speech seemed incoherence, and effort impossible. I needed a pause to adapt myself to my awe and my happiness; upon neither of which will it be necessary for me to dwell. Yet I think I may be understood if I say that from this hour I found that what we call Heaven had truly begun for me. Now indeed for the first time I may say that I believed without wonder in the life everlasting; since now, for the first time, I had a reason sufficient for the continuance of existence. A force like the cohesion of atoms held me to eternal hope. Brighter than the dawn of friendship upon a heart bereft, more solemn than the sunrise of love itself upon a life that had thought itself unloved, stole on the power of the Presence to which I had been admitted in so surprising, and yet, after all, how natural a way! Henceforth the knowledge that this experience might be renewed for me at any turn of thought or act, would illuminate joy itself, so that “it should have no need of the sun to lighten it.” I recalled these words, as one recalls a familiar quotation repeated for the first time on some foreign locality of which it is descriptive. Now I knew what he meant, who wrote: “The Lamb is the Light thereof.”

When I came to myself, I observed the young girl who had before addressed me still strolling on the shore. She beckoned, and I went to her, with a new meekness in my heart. What will He have me to do? If, by the lips of this young thing, He choose to instruct me, let me glory in the humility with which I will be a learner!

All things seemed to be so exquisitely ordered for us in this new life, all flowed so naturally, like one sound-wave into another, with ease so apparent, yet under law so superb, that already I was certain Heaven contained no accidents, and no trivialities; as it did no shocks or revolutions.

“If you like,” said the young girl, “we will cross the sea.”

“But how?” I asked, for I saw no boat.

“Can you not, then, walk upon the water yet?” she answered. “Many of us do, as He did once below. But we no longer call such things miracles. They are natural powers. Yet it is an art to use them. One has to learn it, as we did swimming, or such things, in the old times.”

“I have only been here a short time,” I said, half amused at the little celestial “airs” my young friend wore so sweetly. “I know but little yet. Can you teach me how to walk on water?”

“It would take so much time,” said the young girl, “that I think we should not wait for that. We go on to the next duty, now. You had better learn, I think, from somebody wiser than I. I will take you over another way.”

A great and beautiful shell, not unlike a nautilus, was floating near us, on the incoming tide, and my companion motioned to me to step into this. I obeyed her, laughing, but without any hesitation. “Neither shall there be any more death,” I thought as I glanced over the rose-tinted edges of the frail thing into the water, deeper than any I had ever seen, but unclouded, so that I looked to the bottom of the sea. The girl herself stepped out upon the waves with a practiced air, and lightly drawing the great shell with one hand, bore me after her, as one bears a sledge upon ice. As we came into mid-water we began to meet others, some walking, as she did, some rowing or drifting like myself. Upon the opposite shore uprose the outlines of a more thickly settled community than any I had yet seen.

Watching this with interest that deepened as we approached the shore, I selfishly or uncourteously forgot to converse with my companion, who did not disturb my silence until we landed. As she gave me her hand, she said in a quick, direct tone:

“Well, Miss Mary, I see that you do not know me, after all.”

I felt, as I had already done once or twice before, a certain social embarrassment (which in itself instructed me, as perpetuating one of the minor emotions of life below that I had hardly expected to renew) before my lovely guide, as I shook my head, struggling with the phantasmal memories evoked by her words. No, I did not know her.

“I am Marie SauvÉe. I hope you remember.”

She said these words in French. The change of language served instantly to recall the long train of impressions stored away, who knew how or where, about the name and memory of this girl.

“Marie SauvÉe! You—HERE!” I exclaimed in her own tongue.

At the name, now, the whole story, like the bright side of a dark-lantern, flashed. It was a tale of sorrow and shame, as sad, perhaps, as any that it had been my lot to meet. So far as I had ever known, the little French girl, thrown in my way while I was serving in barracks at Washington, had baffled every effort I had made to win her affection or her confidence, and had gone out of my life as the thistle-down flies on the wind. She had cost me many of those precious drops of the soul’s blood which all such endeavor drains; and in the laboratory of memory I had labelled them, “Worse than Wasted,” and sadly wondered if I should do the same again for such another need, at just such hopeless expenditure, and had reminded myself that it was not good spiritual economy, and said that I would never repeat the experience, and known all the while that I should.

Now here, a spirit saved, shining as the air of Heaven, “without spot or any such thing”—here, wiser in heavenly lore than I, longer with Him than I, nearer to Him than I, dearer to Him, perhaps, than I—here was Marie SauvÉe.

“I do not know how to apologize,” I said, struggling with my emotion, “for the way in which I spoke to you just now. Why should you not be here? Why, indeed? Why am I here? Why”—

“Dear Miss Mary,” cried the girl, interrupting me passionately, “but for you it might never have been as it is. Or never for ages—I cannot say. I might have been a ghost, bound yet to the hated ghost of the old life. It was your doing, at the first—down there—all those years ago. Miss Mary, you were the first person I ever loved. You didn’t know it. I had no idea of telling you. But I did, I loved you. After you went away, I loved you; ever since then, I loved you. I said, I will be fit to love her before I die. And then I said, I will go where she is going, for I shall never get at her anywhere else. And when I entered this place—for I had no friend or relative here that I knew, to meet me—I was more frightened than it is possible for any one like you to understand, and wondered what place there could be for one like me in all this country, and how I could ever get accustomed to their ways, and whether I should shock and grieve them—you can’t understand that; I dreaded it so, I was afraid I should swear after I got to Heaven; I was afraid I might say some evil word, and shame them all, and shame myself more than I could ever get over. I knew I wasn’t educated for any such society. I knew there wasn’t anything in me that would be at home here, but just”—

“But just what, Marie?” I asked, with a humility deeper than I could have expressed.

“But just my love for you, Miss Mary. That was all. I had nothing to come to Heaven on, but loving you and meaning to be a better girl because I loved you. That was truly all.”

“That is impossible!” I said quickly. “Your love for me never brought you here of itself alone. You are mistaken about this. It is neither Christianity nor philosophy.”

“There is no mistake,” persisted the girl, with gentle obstinacy, smiling delightedly at my dogmatism, “I came here because I loved you. Do you not see? In loving you, I loved—for the first time in my life I loved—goodness. I really did. And when I got to this place, I found out that goodness was the same as God. And I had been getting the love of God into my heart, all that time, in that strange way, and never knew how it was with me, until—Oh, Miss Mary, who do you think it was, WHO, that met me within an hour after I died?”

“It was our Master,” she added in an awe-struck, yet rapturous whisper, that thrilled me through. “It was He Himself. He was the first, for I had nobody, as I told you, belonging to me in this holy place, to care for a wretch like me.—He was the first to meet me! And it was He who taught me everything I had to learn. It was He who made me feel acquainted and at home. It was He who took me on from love of you, to love of Him, as you put one foot after another in learning to walk after you have had a terrible sickness. And it was He who never reminded me—never once reminded me—of the sinful creature I had been. Never, by one word or look, from that hour to this day, has He let me feel ashamed in Heaven. That is what He is!” cried the girl, turning upon me, in a little sudden, sharp way she used to have; her face and form were so transfigured before me, as she spoke, that it seemed as if she quivered with excess of light, and were about to break away and diffuse herself upon the radiant air, like song, or happy speech, or melting color.

“Die for Him!” she said after a passionate silence. “If I could die everlastingly and everlastingly and everlastingly, to give Him any pleasure, or to save Him any pain— But then, that’s nothing,” she added, “I love Him. That is all that means.—And I’ve only got to live everlastingly instead. That is the way He has treated me—me!”