Her prayer shot straight to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the blessed light.
In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast into the secular darkness.
She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.
Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him from her as she would, the idea of his goodness--the goodness that justified her through its own appeal--would call up his presence, emerging radiant from the outermost abyss.

Inferior emotions then mingled indistinguishably with her holiest ardours.

Spiritually ambitious, she had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy.

It was no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace.

She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself.