Mary Fisher could not sleep: she lay motionless as the slow hours passed; gazing into the darkness with wide, unseeing eyes, while she thought of all that the coming day would bring. The end of her incredible journey was at hand. The Grand Vizier's word was pledged. The Grand Turk himself would grant her an audience before the hour of noon, to receive her Message from the Great King. Her Message. Through all the difficulties and dangers of her journey, that Message had sustained her. As she had tramped over steep mountain ranges, or won a perilous footing in the water-courses of dry hillside torrents, more like staircases than roads, thoughts and words had often rushed unbidden to her mind and even to her lips. No difficulties could daunt her with that Message still undelivered. Many an evening as she lay down beneath the gnarled trees of an olive grove, or cooled her aching feet in the waters of some clear stream, far beyond any bodily refreshment the intense peace of the Message she was sent to deliver had quieted the heart of the weary messenger. Only now that her goal was almost reached, all power of speech or thought seemed to be taken from her. But, though a candle may burn low, may even for a time be extinguished, it still carries securely within it the possibility of flame. Even so the Messenger of the Great King lay, hour after hour, in the hot night silence; not sleeping, yet smiling: physically exhausted, yet spiritually unafraid. The heat within the chamber became at length unbearably oppressive to one accustomed, as Mary Fisher had been for weeks past, to sleeping under the open sky. Stretching up a thin white arm through the scented darkness, she managed to unfasten the silken cords and buttons of the curtain above her, and to let in a rush of warm night air. It was still too early for the reviving breeze to spring up that would herald the approach of dawn: too early for even the earliest of the orange hawks, that haunted the city in the daytime, to be awake. Cuddled close in cosy nests under the wide eaves, their slumbers were disturbed for a moment as Mary, half sitting up, shook the pierced lattice-work of the shutters that formed the sides of her apartment. Peering through the interstices of fragrant wood, she caught sight of a wan crescent moon, just appearing behind a group of chestnut-trees on the opposite hill above the river. The crescent moon! Her guide over sea and land! Had she not come half round the world to proclaim to the followers of that same Crescent, a people truly sitting in gross darkness, the message of the One true Light? However long the midnight hours, dawn surely must be nigh at hand. Before long, that waning Crescent must set and disappear, and the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings.