"I have not the least idea," Jack said. "The last thing I saw was those children, falling down into the fire. The first thing I remember after that, I was walking among dead bodies in the churchyard. There were plenty of Turks about, but they did not kill me. No one will kill me." "I fear you are right enough," said Osman aside to the others. "It is a pity." Then to Jack, "Come home with me, Grayson Effendi. I will take care of you, and give you meat and drink. Then you shall lie down and sleep----" "No; I shall never sleep again. I dare not. I should see the burning church, and the woman who threw her children into the fire." "Poor fellow! He is certainly mad," said another Turk. Jack turned and faced him. "I am not mad," he said. "I remember all my past life. I am an Englishman. My name is John Grayson. You have taken my wife away." "_That_ at least is madness," some one observed. "Not altogether," whispered Osman. "There was a betrothal, or something, to a beautiful Armenian girl. Franks take these things hard." Then aloud, "But come with me, Grayson Effendi, you will be quite safe." Jack yielded so far as to walk away with him from the group. But when they had gone a little distance he stopped, and said, very quietly, "Osman Effendi, I thank you. But I cannot enter the house of a Turk. I must go back to the ruined dwellings of my friends. I would say 'God bless you!' if, in the face of what I have seen, I could still believe in God. I cannot. Farewell." He took the nearest turning which led to the Armenian Quarter, and soon found himself in the midst of horrors which the effects of no siege, no battle known to history, could have equalled. The dead--and the dying too, who lay undistinguished amongst them--were being dragged to the great trenches outside the town, which the Moslems had dug to receive them. There were many houses, like that of the Vartonians, in which no human creature, not even the babe in arms, was left alive. On and on he wandered, from one horror to another. What he saw, in its details, is best left untold. He was _not_ mad; the consciousness of the past was coming back upon him, every moment more clearly and fully. As the human heart will ever do, in the most overpowering, most universal agony, he still reverted to his own. "Shushan! Shushan!" was his cry, amidst the reeking ruins of the devastated city. Always, everywhere, it is not the "all" we care for, but the "one." We are made so. He bore his burden alone, in the blank unbelief of utter despair. "Cold, strong, passionless, like a dead man's clasp," there closed about his heart the horror of "the everlasting No," choking it to death. No hope, no love, no God, no Christ.