d.

They come from nowhere, those countless legions, from out the shadows
of the spent night; they journey over the ordained path which they have
trod since the beginning of time, which has no beginning, and which
they will tread unto the end of all time which shall have no end.

And, laughing or sobbing, hoping, despairing, we shall fall in as our
line passes and go marching along with them, marching along, until we
came to the place where "_the shadow of the God is like a ram set with
lapis lazuli, adorned with gold and with precious stones_."

"Wait for me."

The whisper was just a part of the shadows, as the girl turned her face
to the East.

Wrapped in her satin cloak, she walked wearily on and on. Her eyes
were wide open, staring in a terrible fatigue; she saw nothing; her
heelless slippers were torn to shreds, her feet were bleeding; she felt
nothing. Not once did she look up or back or round. Had she done so,
she might have noticed that her footprints in the sand were describing
a circle, as our footprints do when we are lost in the bush or the
desert.

The shadows had gone, and the sands stretched a carpet of rose and grey
and gold before her; the sky a canopy of blue and grey and purple above.

Like a lighthouse of Hope, Day was flashing his golden beams across the
sky, a message to the weary who have toiled through the night.

And then, with one great leap he sprang clear of the horizon, just as
Damaris stopped.

She looked back in the direction in which she thought she had come.
There was no sign of the tents; there could not be; they were not out
of sight, but merely wrapped in the mist which, sometimes rises as a
fog in the desert at dawn.

"Let me die soon! let me die soon!"

A great sob shook her as she prayed the prayer of the weak. How much
easier is it to stand at the window, with the police battering at the
door, and, stimulated by its morbid interest, blow out our brains
before the gaping crowd--which will, by the way, take exactly the same
morbid interest in the shooting of a horse in the street--than to
retire into the silence of the prison-cell or seclusion of the tideless
backwater, and there work out our salvation amongst those who do not
know if our name is Smith or Jones or Brown--and much less care!

In the intensity of her prayer she clasped her hands upon the jewelled
symbol upon her breast and looked up.

From out of the west, cleaving the air like a thrown spear, flyi