d and battered beyond all recognition, with eyes red as
blood and bursting from their sockets. Again I saw him, and the scene
was more terrible still. He was entering a great gulf which I knew to
be the mouth of hell, and as he went I saw that he was attended by
ghastly, pallid creatures, who were cold and clammy in spite of the
fires that burned in their breasts.

"Who sent you here?" they cried, in harshly grating voices.

"My brother Roger!" he answered.

"Breathe the prayer dearest to your heart!" they grinned.

"May he wallow in a hell a thousand times blacker and more painful than
this," he said.

"Your prayer shall be granted," they screamed.

Then I lost him amidst gloomy caverns, that burned with fires giving no
light, and I realised that I was still tramping madly on towards the
south-east, but I knew his prayer was answered--my hell was blacker
than his.

Oh! the length of that awful night. Every second seemed a minute,
every minute seemed a day, nay, a night, a thousand dark nights! I was
in eternal punishment! I had died into eternal death!

How many hours I had tramped on I knew not, when I saw in the eastern
sky a red tinge which made the whole horizon seem a wall of heated
steel, set in diamonds. North and south the sky appeared more blue
because of the brighter colour in the east, and it looked more distant,
more unfathomable. Of what moment was this earth of ours in this vast
space which separated it from the nearest star? It was but as the fine
dust of the balance, and yet I, the loathsome thing that walked the
earth, could feel--could suffer--I was something more than the earth!

Slowly the day dawned, brighter and brighter became the flush in the
east, one by one the stars sank out of sight, and suddenly I saw a
golden streak of light flash across the hills, then another, and still
others, until a disc of the king of day became visible. A minute more
and it was day! Day! and yet I was still in night, the gloomy fires of
my heart were still unquenched, the darkness of my soul was still
unillumined.

I now began to think about what my mother would say, what she would
feel. When Wilfred did not come home a search would naturally be made,
and in time he would be found. And what then? I dared not think of
that!

Presently I saw a labourer with hedging tools on his shoulder. I would
speak to him, it would relieve my feelings to hear the sound of a human
voice.

Closer and clo