Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the Spirit of Life said: "There is a compensation in store for such needs as you have expressed."
"Oh, then you do understand?" she exclaimed. "Tell me what compensation, I entreat you!"
"It is ordained," the Spirit answered, "that every soul which seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity."
A glad cry broke from her lips. "Ah, shall I find him at last?" she cried, exultant.
"He is here," said the Spirit of Life.
She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in that unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than his face) drew her toward him with an invincible force.
"Are you really he?" she murmured.
"I am he," he answered.
She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet which overhung the valley.
"Shall we go down together," she asked him, "into that marvellous country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes, and tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?"
"So," he replied, "have I hoped and dreamed."
"What?" she asked, with rising joy. "Then you, too, have looked for me?"
"All my life."
"How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the other world who understood you?"
"Not wholly -- not as you and I understand each other."
"Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy," she sighed.
They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk blown backward like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes separates from their migratory tribe.
