y
before his wondering eyes was erected a great cross upon which he saw
the crucified Saviour.

He saw those in the procession form about the cross and fling themselves
upon the ground before it, while all the others round about knelt. He
saw the monk, standing alone, raise the smaller cross in his hands above
them, as if in blessing. High above it all, he saw the crucified one,
the head lying over on the shoulder.

Then he, too, flung himself face down in the sand, weeping hysterically,
calling wildly, and trying again to utter his prayer. Once more he dared
to look up, in some sudden distrust of his eyes. Again he saw the
prostrate figures, the kneeling ones farther back, the brown-cowled monk
with arms upraised, and the face of agony on the cross.

He was down in the sand again, now with enough control of himself to cry
out his prayer over and over. When he next looked, the vision was gone.
Only a few light clouds ruffled the southern horizon.

He sank back on the sands in an ecstasy. His Witness had come--not as he
thought it would, in a moment of spiritual uplift; but when he had been
sunk by his own sin to fearful depths. Nor had it brought any message of
glory for himself, of gifts or powers. Only the mission of suffering and
service and suffering again at the end. But it was enough.

How long he lay in the joy of the realisation he never knew, but sleep
or faintness at last overcame him.

He was revived by the sharp chill of night, and sat up to find his mind
clear, alert, and active with new purposes. He had suffered greatly from
thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could
not move his swollen tongue. He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold
of the desert night aroused all his latent force. He struggled to his
feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he
had left in the morning. How he reached the hills again he never knew,
nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement. But there
he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing
idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the
desert.

The day which he next remembered clearly, and from which he dated his
new life, was one when he was back in the Meadows. He had ridden there
in the first vagueness and weakness of his recovery, without purpose,
yet feeling that he must go. What he found there made him believe he had
been led to the spot. Stark again