nce is to keep up our hope and spirits. I
think that, after all, we must just stay here till the mist clears up.
Don't be frightened, Ken," he said, taking the boy's hand; "nothing can
happen to us but what God intends."

"But the night," whispered Kenrick, who was most overpowered of the
three; "fancy a night spent here. Mist and cold, hunger and dark. O
this horrible uncertainty and suspense. O for some light," he cried in
an agony; "I could almost die if we had but light."

"O God, give us light," murmured Walter, echoing the words, and uttering
aloud unconsciously his intense prayer; and then he fell on his knees,
and the others, too, hid their faces in their hands as they stood upon
the bleak mountainside, and prayed to Him Whom they knew to be near
them, though they were there alone, and saw nothing save the ground they
knelt upon, and the thick clammy fog moving slowly around and above them
in aimless and monotonous change. To their excited imagination that fog
seemed like a living thing; it seemed as though it were actuated with a
cold and deathful determination, and as though it were peopled by a
thousand silent spirits, leaning over them and chilling their hearts as
they shrouded them in the gigantic foldings of their ghostly robes.

And soon, as though their passionate prayer had been heard, and an angel
had been sent to rend the mist, the wind, rushing up from the ravine,
tore for itself a narrow passage--and a gleam of wavering light broke in
upon them through the white folds of that deathful curtain, showing them
the wall of sunken precipice, and the dark outline of Bardlyn hill. If
this had been a moment in which they could have admired one of Nature's
most awfully majestic sights, they would have gazed with enthusiastic
joy on the diorama of valley and mountain revealed through this mighty
rent in the side of their misty pavilion, filled up by the blue far-off
sky; but at this moment of dominant terror they had no room for any
other thoughts but how to save their lives from the danger that,
surrounded them.

"Light," cried Walter, springing up eagerly; "thank God! Perhaps the
mist is going to clear away." But the hope was fallacious, for in the
direction where their path lay all was still dark, and the chilly mist
soon closed again, though not so densely, over the wound which the
breeze from the chasm below them had momentarily made.

"Did you see that we are _close to the Razor_?" said Walte