e I began to write, and I am so weak that I can
barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul. He has gone far wrong. He will
come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my
prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh until
he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him. Goodbye,
dear child. Be at peace, for all will yet be well.

'When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with
him.'

The letter ended there, and the reader's dazzled eyes looked into the
darkness. One flickering flame hovered above the embers of the fire and
seemed to leave them and return, to die and break to life again. At last
it fluttered upward and was gone.

The runnel, like the greater stream below, had many voices. It chattered
light-hearted trifles, lamented child-like griefs, and sobbed itself to
sleep over and over and over. In the black canon the river bellowed its
rage and triumph and despair. The shadows of the night were deep, and
silence brooded within them, and the ears thrilled and tingled to the
monitions of its voiceless sea.

'Father!' he whispered.

The night gave no response, but the answer sounded in the lonely man's
heart:

'I am here.'

III

In the broad daylight it was not easy to believe that the experience of
the night-time was more than an excitement of the nerves. The tide of
habitual conviction set strongly against a superstitious fancy. None the
less the Solitary spent many hours in tender and remorseful musings over
the lost father, and all day long he wondered at the voice which had
seemed to answer him.

'It would be well for me, perhaps,' he said, when he had spent
two-thirds of the day under the spell of these clear recollections--'it
would be well for me, perhaps, if I could think it true.'

An inward voice said, as if with deliberate emphasis, 'It is true.'

The words did not seem to be his own, and the thought was not his
own, and he was startled, almost wildly. But he had been much given to
introspection. He was accustomed to the study of his own mind's working,
and the inward voice impressed him less than if he had been a man of
simpler intellect. The intelligence of man plays many curious tricks
upon itself, and he was ready with explanations. He pored upon these,
turned them over, criticised them, sat secure in them.

The inward voice said 'Paul,' and nothing more. No call had sounded on
the waking ear, and yet