r as I can;" and he sat down upon the ledge just above this
hollow, and looked about him, attentively, in all directions.

The wind had ceased to blow; not a leaf stirred; silence reigned over
the strewn boulders. Downward, where the ground fell away to a deep
chasm, everything was indistinct; to the west, beneath banked masses
of cloud, the last glow of the sunset showed in blood-red bands, and
on this side all the intervening trees were black as ink; all about
him the shadows filled every hollow, and the rocks were like shoals or
reefs above the surface of a stagnant sea.

The place was a wilderness, a solitude, the dead and barren landscape
of dreams--quite empty, unoccupied, a place that even ghosts would
shun. He sat thinking, and listening; and soon it occurred to him
that, though all seemed so dead and so silent, this place was really
full of life. He heard the faint buzz of belated bees questing in
tufts of heather or foxglove bells, a bat flitted over his head, some
small furred thing scuttled past his feet; and in the air there were
thousands of winged insects, whose tiny voices one could hear by
straining one's ears. Listening intently for such murmurs, he thought:
"Perhaps really and truly one has not any right to kill the smallest
of these gnats. All that stuff about self-protection, an' struggle for
existence, is just fiddle-de-dee in so far's God's concerned. He never
meant it, an' never will approve of it. It's just nature's hatefulness
and cruelty--not permitted or intended, an' to be put right some day."

It grew darker and darker, and the shadows rose all round him till he
was like a man who had climbed out of the gray sea upon the only rock
that was not yet submerged. When he got up presently and looked down
at the hollow where he believed the corpse had lain, he could no
longer see it. It was gone, lost in shadow.

Then he knelt upon his rock, and prayed--offered up the last agonized
prayer of a despairing human soul. "O God--have mercy on me just so
far's this. Don't let me die hopeless. I've submitted myself into Your
hands. I don't complain. I don't question. I'm going to do it. But
don't send me out in total darkness. Give me a blink of light--just
one blink o' light before I go."

Was it this that had been wanted, this that had been waited for--the
true acknowledgment, the true submission, the cry for mercy of the
repentant creature who has already tasted more than the bitterness of
death?