they were calling out that terrible
question, 'What are the depths, the fearful depths, to which you are
being drawn?' And through the streaming light I saw my mother's face,
and a look of anguish crossed it, as suddenly the rope broke, and those
who were drawing it on the opposite side went over with a crash,
dragging my soul over with them.

I woke in a terror, and cried out so loudly that Duncan came running
into my room to see what was the matter.

'Nothing, Duncan,' I said, 'I was only dreaming; I thought I had gone
over a precipice.'

'No, thank God, you're all safe, sir,' he said. 'Shall I open your
window a bit? Maybe the room's close; is it?'

'Thank you, Duncan,' I answered; 'I shall be all right now. I'm so sorry
I have waked you.'

'You haven't done that, sir; me and Polly have been up all night with
the little lad. He's sort of funny, too, sir, burning hot, and yet he
shivers like, and he clings to his daddy; so I've been walking a mile or
two with him up and down our chamber floor, and I heard you skriking
out, and says Polly, "Run and see what ails him." So you haven't
disturbed me, sir, not one little bit, you haven't.'

He left me then, and I tried to sleep, but sleep seemed far from me. I
could hear Duncan's footsteps pacing up and down in the next room; I
could hear little John's fretful cry; I could hear the rain beating
against the casement; I could hear the soughing and whistling of the
wind; I could hear Polly's old eight-day clock striking the hours and
the half-hours of that long, dismal night; but through it all, and above
it all, I could hear the preacher's question, 'What are the depths, the
fearful depths, to which you are being drawn?'

I found it impossible to close my eyes again, so I drew up the blind,
and, as morning began to dawn, I watched the pitiless rain and longed
for day. The footsteps in the next room ceased as the light came on, and
I concluded that the weary child was at last asleep. I wished that I was
asleep too. I thought how often my mother, when I was a child, must have
walked up and down through long weary nights with me. I wondered
whether, as she did so, she spent the slow, tedious hours in praying for
her boy, and then I wondered how she would have felt, and how she would
have borne it, had she known that the child in her arms would grow up to
manhood, living for this world and not for the Christ she loved. I
wondered if she _did_ know this now, in the far-of