'It was the voice that became silent ten years before in the sick-room next my own!
''Miss Brentnall!' I exclaimed, not knowing what I said.
''Orloff, dear Orloff!' replied _the voice_, once more from the lips of Bessie Cartwright.
'And then the blood came rushing back to the young girl's face. Timidly she sat up, passed her hand across her eyes, and said faintly:
''I thought that picture you showed me was I. Then I felt myself dying. You were by me till all the room grew dark. I hardly remember what came then; but I have had, oh! so many strange thoughts, and been in so many strange places! I thought I was killed with a little knife: I was on the sea; I was close by a great town that rose from the water's side; I was drowning: then I was myself again in the old dress I wore when I came to you; then I seemed to be all things at once, and you called me a name I had heard before, when I lay in the bed dying; and oh! forgive me, Sir, I called you by your Christian name, Orloff, _dear_ Orloff! I said, do forgive me: I will never do it again.'
''You must do something else than that,' said I, no longer awe-stricken and trembling, for in a moment the mystery of my life had parted like a fog, and I saw its meaning beyond in the clearest of heaven's twilight. 'Something else than that, Bessie. You must never call me by any other name than _dear_ Orloff! Can you call me that? For _I love you_: GOD only knows how I love you. Can you?'
'The girl looked at me with parted lips; caught her breath quickly; hid her face in my bosom; and once more after all those years the beloved voice, knowing what it said, replied:
'Bessie Cartwright is my wife. Not until years afterward did I tell her the meaning of her dream; nor how through lives and deaths she had followed me to save and claim her own. She knows it now; we both keep it for the grateful wonder of our prayers; a mystery like all mysteries had we but the key, with its grand, beneficent meaning, unmeaning, contemptible only to those who read it wrong or not at all.'
'And you do mean to tell to me zat ze beautiful lady you have now espouse, be vonce in ze body of ze vare ugly woman, ze red-head bird vat you call him, and ze marmosette; you mean to say to me zat?'