d cometh to pass."

This text was the answer to his prayer for guidance?

He seated himself by the window, and gazed out into the darkness. He
considered piously the wonders of terrestrial life, a succession of
accidents all foreordained by God, an apparent drifting that was in
fact one steady propulsion by the hand of fate. From the rich,
ancestral house of coraline limestone across the sea to strange lands.
From dignity to abasement. From loneliness to this faint, delicious
fragrance in which the heart dissolved. From a dream of freedom to the
service of love through the agency of death.

CHAPTER LI

It was twilight. David Verne sat in the study, his chin on his breast.
Hamoud, appearing in the doorway, gazed round the room. He had a
folded newspaper in his hand.

He looked carefully at the fireplace, where logs were piled ready for
lighting over a heap of brushwood and crumpled wrapping paper. Then he
regarded the center table, on which stood the Venetian goblet, the
caraffe, and the bottle filled with the medicine prescribed by Dr.
Fallows. In the expiring daylight Hamoud, motionless in his robes,
loomed paler than usual, his handsome face very grave.

The piano attracted his attention. In the shadows it had the aspect of
a squatting monster that bared at him the teeth of its wide mouth. As
if he had been awaiting this grotesque effect of challenge, he moved
toward the hazy windows, and began to curtain them.

David murmured listlessly:

"Has the doctor gone?"

Hamoud gave a slight start. With his hand on the last window curtain,
he inclined his head, listening in awe to the tremor of that voice.
When he had passed his tongue over his lips he responded:

"Yes."

He drew the last curtain slowly. As he did so, his visage, sharpened
by the dying light, was turned toward David; his gemlike lips, without
parting, seemed to say, "Look! it is the world of sky and trees, of
sunrise and noon, sunset and night, that I am shutting out."

The study lay in darkness.

Through this darkness Hamoud moved silently toward the center table.
He tweaked the lamp cord: a gush of mellow rays leaped out to cover the
scattered piles of manuscript, the Venetian goblet, the bottle of
medicine. Hamoud moved the wheel chair closer to these objects, so
that David by reaching forth his hand might touch them if he wished.
Then, after stepping back to consider this arrangement with a strained
look, he went to the