The next morning dawned pallidly over a sea of gray mist--not a glimpse of the landscape was visible--nothing but a shadowy vastness of floating vapor that moved slowly fold upon fold, wave upon wave, as though bent on blotting out the world. A very faint, chill light peered through the narrow arched window of the room where Alwyn lay, still wrapped in that profound repose, so like the last long sleep from which some of our modern scientists tell us there can be no awakening. His condition was unchanged,--the wan beams of the early clay falling cross his features intensified their waxen stillness and pallor,--the awful majesty of death was on him,--the pathetic helplessness and perishableness of Body without Spirit. Presently the monastery bell began to ring for matins, and as its clear chime struck through the deep silence, the door opened, and Heliobas, accompanied by another monk, whose gentle countenance and fine, soft eyes betokened the serenity of his disposition, entered the apartment. Together they approached the couch, and gazed long and earnestly at the supernaturally slumbering man. "He is still far away!" said Heliobas at last, sighing as he spoke. "So far away that my mind misgives me.... Alas, Hilarion! how limited is our knowledge! ... even with all the spiritual aids of spiritual life how little can be accomplished! We learn one thing, and another presents itself--we conquer one difficulty, and another instantly springs up to obstruct our path. Now if I had only had the innate perception required to foresee the possible flight of this released Immortal creature, might I not have saved it from some incalculable misery and suffering?" "I think not," answered in rather musing accents the monk called Hilarion--"I think not. Such protection can never be exercised by mere human intelligence, if this soul is to be saved or shielded in its invisible journeying it will be by some means that not all the marvels of our science can calculate. You say he was without faith?" "Entirely" "What was his leading principle?" "A desire for what he called Truth," replied Heliobas. "He, like many others of his class, never took the trouble to consider very deeply the inner meaning of Pilate's famous question, 'What IS Truth?' WE know what it is, as generally accepted--a few so called facts which in a thousand years will all be contradicted, mixed up with a few finite opinions propounded by unstable minded men. In brief, Truth, according to the world, is simply whatever the world is pleased to consider as Truth for the time being. 'Tis a somewhat slight thing to stake one's immortal destinies upon!" Hilarion raised one of Alwyn's cold, pulseless hands--it was stiff, and white as marble. "I suppose," he said, "there is no doubt of his returning hither?"