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There was a tone of beseeching in these last words which Tabea had not been wont to use.

The director looked more numb now than ever. Tabea’s words had given him a rude blow, and he could not at once recover. His lips moved without speaking, and his face assumed a look betokening inward suffering.

“Great God of wisdom, must I then tell her?” said Friedsam when he got breath. He stood up and gazed out of the square window in indecision.

“Tabea,” he said presently, turning full upon her and looking into her now pale face upturned to the light, “I thought my secret would die in my breast, but you wring it from me. You say that I have no infirmities–no desire for companionship like other men or women. It is the voice of Sophia, the wisdom of the Almighty, that bids me humble myself before you this day.”

Here he paused in visible but suppressed emotion. “These things,” he said, pointing to his wooden couch, “these hardships of the body, these self-denials of my vocation, give me no trouble. I have one great soul-affliction, and that is what you reproach me for lacking, namely, the longing to love and to be loved. And that trial you laid upon me the first time I saw your face and heard your words in your mother’s house on the Wissahickon. O Tabea, you are not like the rest! you are not like the rest! Even when you go wrong, it is not like the rest. It is the vision of the life I might have led with such a woman as you that troubles my dreams in the night-time, when, across the impassable gulf of my irrevocable vow, I have stretched out my hands in entreaty to you.”

This declaration changed instantly the color of Tabea’s thoughts of life. Daniel Scheible and his little love scrawls seemed to her lofty spirit as nothing now that she saw herself in the light thrown upon her by the love of the great master whose spirit had evoked Ephrata, and whose genius uttered itself in angelic harmonies. She loathed the little life that now opened before her. There seemed nothing in heaven or earth so desirable as to possess the esteem of Friedsam. But she stood silent and condemned.

“I have had one comfort,” proceeded Brother Friedsam after a while. “When I have perceived your strength of character, when I have heard your exquisite voice uttering the melodies with which I am inspired, I have thought my work was sweeter because Tabea shared it, and I have hoped that you would yet more and more share it as years and discipline should ripen your spirit.”

The director felt faint; he sat down and looked dejectedly into the corner of the room farthest away from where Tabea stood. He roused himself in a few moments, and turned about again, to find Tabea kneeling on the flagstones before him.

“I have denied the Lord!” she moaned, for her judgment had now come completely round to Friedsam’s standpoint. His condemnation seemed bitterer than death. “Brother Friedsam, I have denied the Lord!”

Friedsam regarded the kneeling figure for a moment, and then he reached out his hands, solemnly placing them on her head with a motherly tenderness, while a tremor went through his frame.

“Thou, dear child, shalt do thy first work over again,” he said. “Thou shalt take a new vow, and when thou art converted then shalt thou, like Peter, strengthen the others.” And, withdrawing his hands, he said: “I will pray for you, Tabea, every night of my life when I hear the cock crow.”

Tabea rose up slowly and went out at the door, walking no longer like a Hofcavalier, but like one in a trance. Dimly she saw the sisters standing without the door of Sharon; there was Thecla, with half-amused face, and there was Persida, curious as ever; there were Sister Petronella and Sister Blandina and others, and behind all the straight, tall form of austere Jael. Without turning to the right or to the left, Tabea directed her steps to the group at the door of Sharon.