aid his prayers, he made his challenge.

"I'll give you Hamlet if you don't take Mother--" A pause. "Only I can't
cut Hamlet's throat. But I could lose him, if that would do.. . Only
you must take him now--I couldn't do it to-morrow." His voice began to
tremble. He was frightened. He could feel behind his closed eyes that
the darkness had gathered. The place seemed to be filled with rolling
smoke, and the house was so terribly still!

He said again: "You can take Hamlet. He's my best thing. You can--You
can--"

There followed then, with the promptitude of a most admirably managed
theatrical climax, a peal of thunder that seemed to strike the house
with the iron hand of a giant. Two more came, and then, for a second, a
silence, more deadly than all the earlier havoc.

Jeremy felt that God had leapt upon him. He opened his eyes, turned as
though to run, and then saw, with a freezing check upon the very beat of
his heart, that Hamlet was gone.

V

There was no Hamlet!

In that second of frantic unreasoning terror he received a conviction of
God that no rationalistic training in later years was able to remove.

There was no Hamlet!--only the dusky dirty place with a black
torrent-driven world beyond it. With a rush as of a thousand whips
slashing the air, the rain came down upon the glass. Jeremy turned,
crying "Mother! Mother! I want Mother!" and flung himself at the red
glass doors; fumbling in his terror for the handle, he felt as though
the end of the world had come; such a panic had seized him as only
belongs to the most desperate of nightmares. God had answered him.
Hamlet was gone and in a moment Jeremy himself might be seized...

He felt frantically for the door; he beat upon the glass.

He cried "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

He had found the door, but just as he turned the handle he was aware
of a new sound, heard distantly, through the rain. Looking back he saw,
from behind a rampart of dusty flower-pots, first a head, then a rough
tousled body, then a tail that might be recognised amongst all the tails
of Christendom.

Hamlet (who had trained himself to meet with a fine natural show of
bravery every possible violence save only thunder) crept ashamed, dirty
and smiling towards his master. God had only played His trick--Abraham
and Isaac after all.

Then with a fine sense of victory and defiance Jeremy turned back,
looked up at the slashing rain, gazed out upon the black country, at
last seize