"I shall be curious if she can tell me thoughts that I have confided
to no living person," said Monsieur Becker.

Minna entered the room.
"Well, my daughter, and how is your familiar spirit?"

"He suffers, father," she answered, bowing to Wilfrid. "Human
passions, clothed in their false riches, surrounded him all night, and

showed him all the glories of the world. But you think these things
mere tales."

"Tales as beautiful to those who read them in their brains as the
'Arabian Nights' to common minds," said the pastor, smiling.

"Did not Satan carry our Savior to the pinnacle of the Temple, and
show him all the kingdoms of the world?" she said.

"The Evangelists," replied her father, "did not correct their copies
very carefully, and several versions are in existence."

"You believe in the reality of these visions?" said Wilfrid to Minna.
"Who can doubt when he relates them."

"He?" demanded Wilfrid. "Who?"
"He who is there," replied Minna, motioning towards the chateau.

"Are you speaking of Seraphita?" he said.
The young girl bent her head, and looked at him with an expression of

gentle mischief.
"You too!" exclaimed Wilfrid, "you take pleasure in confounding me.

Who and what is she? What do you think of her?"
"What I feel is inexplicable," said Minna, blushing.

"You are all crazy!" cried the pastor.
"Farewell, until to-morrow evening," said Wilfrid.

CHAPTER IV
THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY

There are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays
co-operate. Nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of

ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn
the spectators. Transmitted as heirlooms from generation to

generation, these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could
be the most faithful of historians had they speech. They know the joys

and sorrows of the great and those of the small. Everywhere do they
go; they are worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to

usurers, borne off in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in
masterpieces conceived by art for their protection. None, except the

pearl of Cleopatra, has been lost. The Great and the Fortunate
assemble to witness the coronation of some king, whose trappings are

the work of men's hands, but the purple of whose raiment is less
glorious than that of the flowers of the field. These festivals,

splendid in light, bathed in music which the hand of man creates, aye,
all the triumphs of that hand are subdued by a thought, crushed by a

sentiment. The Mind can illumine in a man and round a man a light more
vivid, can open his ear to more melodious harmonies, can seat him on

clouds of shining constellations and teach him to question them. The
Heart can do still greater things. Man may come into the presence of

one sole being and find in a single word, a single look, an influence
so weighty to bear, of so luminous a light, so penetrating a sound,

that he succumbs and kneels before it. The most real of all splendors
are not in outward things, they are within us. A single secret of

science is a realm of wonders to the man of learning. Do the trumpets
of Power, the jewels of Wealth, the music of Joy, or a vast concourse

of people attend his mentalfestival? No, he finds his glory in some
dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering man whispers a single

word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted in a mine, reveals
to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every attractive form

which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated in a wayside
ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the Divine, with all

their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine exile; he walked
attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who prayed and those

who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the Sent of God, who
knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three of his

disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest of
inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material

Forms, illuminating the Spiritual Faculties, so that they saw him in
his glory, and the earth lay at their feet like a cast-off sandal.

Monsieur Becker, Wilfrid, and Minna were all under the influence of
fear as they took their way to meet the extraordinary being whom each

desired to question. To them, in their several ways, the Swedish
castle had grown to mean some giganticrepresentation, some spectacle

like those whose colors and masses are skilfully and harmoniously
marshalled by the poets, and whose personages, imaginary actors to

men, are real to those who begin to penetrate the Spiritual World. On
the tiers of this Coliseum Monsieur Becker seated the gray legions of

Doubt, the stern ideas, the specious formulas of Dispute. He convoked
the various antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they

all appeared, in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which
art embodies Time,--an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the

other a broken globe, the human universe.
Wilfrid had bidden to the scene his earliest illusions and his latest

hopes, human destiny and its conflicts, religion and its conquering
powers.

Minna saw heaven confusedly by glimpses; love raised a curtain wrought
with mysterious images, and the melodious sounds which met her ear

redoubled her curiosity.
To all three, therefore, this evening was to be what that other

evening had been for the pilgrims to Emmaus, what a vision was to
Dante, an inspiration to Homer,--to them, three aspects of the world

revealed, veils rent away, doubts dissipated, darkness illumined.
Humanity in all its moods expecting light could not be better

represented than here by this young girl, this man in the vigor of his
age, and these old men, of whom one was learned enough to doubt, the

other ignorant enough to believe. Never was any scene more simple in
appearance, nor more portentous in reality.

When they entered the room, ushered in by old David, they found
Seraphita standing by a table on which were served the various dishes

which compose a "tea"; a form of collation which in the North takes
the place of wine and its pleasures,--reserved more exclusively for

Southern climes. Certainly nothing proclaimed in her, or in him, a
being with the strange power of appearing under two distinct forms;

nothing about her betrayed the manifold powers which she wielded. Like
a careful housewife attending to the comfort of her guests, she

ordered David to put more wood into the stove.
"Good evening, my neighbors," she said. "Dear Monsieur Becker, you do

right to come; you see me living for the last time, perhaps. This
winter has killed me. Will you sit there?" she said to Wilfrid. "And

you, Minna, here?" pointing to a chair beside her. "I see you have
brought your embroidery. Did you invent that stitch? the design is

very pretty. For whom is it,--your father, or monsieur?" she added,
turning to Wilfrid. "Surely we ought to give him, before we part, a

remembrance of the daughters of Norway."
"Did you suffer much yesterday?" asked Wilfrid.

"It was nothing," she answered; "the suffering gladdened me; it was
necessary, to enable me to leave this life."

"Then death does not alarm you?" said Monsieur Becker, smiling, for he
did not think her ill.

"No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying: to some, death is
victory, to others, defeat."

"Do you think that you have conquered?" asked Minna.
"I do not know," she said, "perhaps I have only taken a step in the

path."
The lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled

beneath slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the
prying guests and kept them silent. Monsieur Becker was the first to

recover courage.
"Dear child," he said, "you are truth itself, and you are ever kind. I

would ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your
tea-table. If we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things;

if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of
our doubts?"

"Ah!" she said smiling, "I walk on the clouds. I visit the depths of
the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the