oceed to the village and inform the
inhabitants that if they wish to save their lives they had best be gone
immediately--immediately, you understand."

The Syrian started from his daze.

"Holiness," he stammered, stretching out a hand, "the lists, the lists!"

(He had seen what these were.)

But Silvester only smiled as He tossed the fragments on to the table.
Then He stood up.

"You need not trouble, my son.... We shall not need these any more....

"One last word, Eminences.... If there is one heart here that doubts or
is afraid, I have a word to say."

He paused, with an extraordinarily simple deliberateness, ran the eyes
round the tense faces turned to Him.

"I have had a Vision of God," He said softly. "I walk no more by faith,
but by sight."

II

An hour later the priest toiled back in the hot twilight up the path
from the village, followed by half-a-dozen silent men, twenty yards
behind, whose curiosity exceeded their credulousness. He had left a few
more standing bewildered at the doors of the little mud-houses; and had
seen perhaps a hundred families, weighted with domestic articles, pour
like a stream down the rocky path that led to Khaifa. He had been cursed
by some, even threatened; stared upon by others; mocked by a few. The
fanatical said that the Christians had brought God's wrath upon the
place, and the darkness upon the sky: the sun was dying, for these
hounds were too evil for him to look upon and live. Others again seemed
to see nothing remarkable in the state of the weather....

There was no change in that sky from its state an hour before, except
that perhaps it had lightened a little as the sun climbed higher behind
that impenetrable dusky shroud. Hills, grass, men's faces--all bore to
the priest's eyes the look of unreality; they were as things seen in a
dream by eyes that roll with sleep through lids weighted with lead. Even
to other physical senses that unreality was present; and once more he
remembered his dream, thankful that that horror at least was absent. But
silence seemed other than a negation of sound, it was a thing in itself,
an affirmation, unruffled by the sound of footsteps, the thin barking of
dogs, the murmur of voices. It appeared as if the stillness of eternity
had descended and embraced the world's activities, and as if that world,
in a desperate attempt to assert its own reality, was braced in a set,
motionless, noiseless, breathless effort to hold itself in be