Suddenly
it seemed to her as if she saw Androvsky coming from them towards
the white road, helping a man who was pale, and who stumbled as if
half-fainting, yet whose face was full of a fierce passion of joy--the
stranger whose influence had driven him out of the monastery into the
world. She bent down her head and hid her face in her hands, praying,
praying with all her strength for courage in this supreme moment of her
life. But almost directly the prayers died on her lips and in her heart,
and she found herself repeating the words of _The Imitation_:
"Love watcheth, and sleeping, slumbereth not. When weary it is not
tired; when straitened it is not constrained; when frightened it is
not disturbed; but like a vivid flame and a burning torch it mounteth
upwards and securely passeth through all. Whosoever loveth knoweth the
cry of this voice."
Again and again she said the words: "It securely passeth through
all--it securely passeth through all." Now, at last, she was to know
the uttermost truth of those words which she had loved in her happiness,
which she clung to now as a little child clings to its father's hand.
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