shut hard. He spoke as if to himself, brokenly.

"He does not believe--a single word--I say. I can't help him--I
_can't_ help him."

Suddenly the clinched fists flung out as if of a power not their own,
and his voice rang across the room.

"God!" The word shot from him as if a thunderbolt fell with it. "God!
Lift the bandage!"

A log fell with a crash into the fire; great battling shadows blurred
all the air; he was gone.

The man, startled, drew up his bent shoulders, and pushed back a lock of
gray hair and stared about, shaking, bewildered. The ringing voice, the
word that had flashed as if out of a larger atmosphere--the place was
yet full of these, and the shock of it added a keenness to his misery.
His figure swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his
arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore
roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his
volition, he spoke aloud.

"God, God, God!" his voice said, not prayerfully, but repeating the
sound that had shocked his torture. The word wailed, mocked, reproached,
defied--and yet it was a prayer. Out of a soul in mortal stress that
word comes sometimes driven by a force of the spirit like the force of
the lungs fighting for breath--and it is a prayer.

"God, God, God!" the broken voice repeated, and sobs cut the words. And
again. Over and over, and again the sobbing broke it.

As suddenly as if a knife had stopped the life inside the body, all
sound stopped. A movement shook the man as he lay face down, arms
stretched. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was quiet, with a quiet
that meant muscles stretched, nerves alert. Slowly, slowly the tightened
muscles of the arms pushed the shoulders backward and upward; the head
lifted; the face turned outward, and if an observer had been there he
might have seen by the glow of the firelight that the features wet,
distorted, wore, more than all at this moment, a look of amazement.
Slowly, slowly, moving as if afraid to disturb something--a dream--a
presence--the man sat erect as he had been sitting before, only that the
rigidity was in some way gone. He sat alert, his eyes wide, filled with
astonishment, gazing before him eagerly--a look different from the dull
stare of an hour ago by the difference between hope and despair. His
hands caught at the stuff of the divan on either side and clutched it.

All the time the look of his face changed; all the time, not