Alwyn started up, seized the written sheets, and scanned them eagerly.
"It is my handwriting!" he muttered in a tone of stupefied amazement.
"Of course! Whose handwriting should it be?" returned Heliobas, watching him with scientifically keen, yet kindly interest.
"Then it IS true!" he exclaimed. "True--by the sweetness of her eyes,--true, by the love-lit radiance of her smile!--true, O thou God whom I dared to doubt! true by the marvels of Thy matchless, wisdom!"
And with this strange outburst, he began to read in feverish haste what he had written. His breath came and went quickly,--his cheeks flushed, his eyes dilated,--line after line he perused with apparent wonder and rapture,--when suddenly interrupting himself he raised his head and recited in a half whisper: "With thundering notes of song sublime I cast my sins away from me--On stairs of sound I mount--I climb! The angels wait and pray for me!
"I heard that stanza somewhere when I was a boy ... why do I think of it now? SHE has waited,--so she said,--these many thousand days!"
He paused meditatively,--and then resumed his reading, Heliobas touched his arm.
"It will take you some time to read that, Mr. Alwyn," he gently observed. "You have written more than you know."
Alwyn roused himself and looked straight at the speaker. Putting down his manuscript and resting one hand upon it, he gazed with an air of solemn inquiry into the noble face turned steadfastly toward his own.
"Tell me," he said wistfully, "how has it happened? This composition is mine and yet not mine. For it is a grand and perfect poem of which I dare not call myself the author! I might as well snatch HER crown of starry flowers and call myself an Angel!"
He spoke with mingled fervor and humility. To any ordinary observer he would have seemed to be laboring under home strange hallucination,--but Heliobas was more deeply instructed.
"Come, come! ... your thoughts are wide of this world," he said kindly. "Try to recall them! I can tell you nothing, for I know nothing. ... you have been absent many hours."
"Absent? yes!" and Alwyn's voice thrilled with an infinite regret. "Absent from earth.. ah! would to God I might hive stayed with her, in Heaven! My love, my love! where shal I find her if not in the FIELD OF ARDATH?"