His Other Wife: A Novel — page 397: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A MEETING. 389 ness, and her eyes overflowed with a wonderful light of thanksgiving, In that moment the man’s soul seemed to become en- veloped in a cloud of glory. The apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and a new earth, that once, and only once, in a human life crosses the spirit’s sight, was before him. He had lost and deeply mourned for a bright, pure, tenderly-loved child, who had been to his heart as a pet bird that must be nursed, and cared for, and caressed. He found her an exquisite woman, with all the mystical, entrancing exhalations of passion and poesy floating about her, and all the un- conscious potency of her sex trembling in her soft beauty. There was neither madness, nor fever, nor pain, nor reluctance in the utter rendering up of all his being to the sweet bewilderment of /4zs woman’s presence. For the first time he was conscious of the wide differ- ence between i/fa/uation and Jove. The one, a burning vein of electric fire that riots through blood and brain— that makes the pulse beat to suffocation—that blinds the vision and inflames every sense; the other, a profound and perfect lulling of the soul to blissful rest—a foretaste of that supreme hour when the beatific raptures of angels -* shall open the new life of the redeemed spirit. As for Faith—well, she did not know what had come to her, but the past and the future seemed alike to have been annihilated, The blessed present was enough for her. 4 Eomicbooks: (E(@)