e, he found
himself crying into the great world to know whether there was an ear to
hear. What if there should come to him no answer? How frightful then
would be his loneliness! But to seem not to be heard might be part of
the discipline of his darkness! It might be for the perfecting of his
faith that he must not yet know how near God was to him!

"Lord," he cried, "eternal life is to know thee and thy Father; I do
not know thee and thy Father; I have not eternal life; I have but life
enough to hunger for more: show me plainly of the Father whom thou
alone knowest."

And as he prayed, something like a touch of God seemed to begin and
grow in him till it was more than his heart could hold, and the
universe about him was not large enough to hold in its hollow the heart
that swelled with it.

"God is enough," he said, and sat in peace.

CHAPTER XIII.

A SOUND.

All at once came to his ear through the night a strange something.
Whence or what it was he could not even conjecture. Was it a moan of
the river from below? Was it a lost music-tone that had wandered from
afar and grown faint? Was it one of those mysterious sounds he had
read of as born in the air itself, and not yet explained of science?
Was it the fluttered skirt of some angelic song of lamentation?--for if
the angels rejoice, they surely must lament! Or was it a stilled human
moaning? Was any wrong being done far down in the white-gleaming
meadows below, by the banks of the river whose platinum-glimmer he
could descry through the molten amethystine darkness of the starry
night?

Presently came a long-drawn musical moan: it must be the sound of some
muffled instrument! Verily night was the time for strange things!
Could sounds be begotten in the fir trees by the rays of the hot sun,
and born in the stillness of the following dark, as the light which the
diamond receives in the day glows out in the gloom? There are parents
and their progeny that never exist together!

Again the sound--hardly to be called sound! It resembled a vibration
of organ-pipe too slow and deep to affect the hearing; only this rather
seemed too high, as if only his soul heard it. He would steal softly
down the dumb stone-stair! Some creature might be in trouble and
needing help!

He crept back along the bartizan. The stair was dark as the very heart
of the night. He groped his way down. The spiral stair is the safest
of all: you cannot tumble far ere brough