coolness of its atmosphere as into a bath.
What he searched for he did not know, or, rather, did not define. He
knew only that he was suffering, that a longing for Angele, for some
object around which his great love could enfold itself, was tearing
at his heart with iron teeth. He was ready to be deluded; craved the
hallucination; begged pitifully for the illusion; anything rather than
the empty, tenantless night, the voiceless silence, the vast loneliness
of the overspanning arc of the heavens.

Before the chancel rail of the altar, under the sanctuary lamp, Vanamee
sank upon his knees, his arms folded upon the rail, his head bowed down
upon them. He prayed, with what words he could not say for what he did
not understand--for help, merely, for relief, for an Answer to his cry.

It was upon that, at length, that his disordered mind concentrated
itself, an Answer--he demanded, he implored an Answer. Not a vague
visitation of Grace, not a formless sense of Peace; but an Answer,
something real, even if the reality were fancied, a voice out of the
night, responding to his, a hand in the dark clasping his groping
fingers, a breath, human, warm, fragrant, familiar, like a soft, sweet
caress on his shrunken cheeks. Alone there in the dim half-light of
the decaying Mission, with its crumbling plaster, its naive crudity
of ornament and picture, he wrestled fiercely with his desires--words,
fragments of sentences, inarticulate, incoherent, wrenched from his
tight-shut teeth.

But the Answer was not in the church. Above him, over the high altar,
the Virgin in a glory, with downcast eyes and folded hands, grew vague
and indistinct in the shadow, the colours fading, tarnished by centuries
of incense smoke. The Christ in agony on the Cross was but a lamentable
vision of tormented anatomy, grey flesh, spotted with crimson. The St.
John, the San Juan Bautista, patron saint of the Mission, the gaunt
figure in skins, two fingers upraised in the gesture of benediction,
gazed stolidly out into the half-gloom under the ceiling, ignoring the
human distress that beat itself in vain against the altar rail below,
and Angele remained as before--only a memory, far distant, intangible,
lost.

Vanamee rose, turning his back upon the altar with a vague gesture of
despair. He crossed the church, and issuing from the low-arched door
opposite the pulpit, once more stepped out into the garden. Here, at
least, was reality. The warm, still air descend