"'For I have satisfied the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul,'" John Grayson repeated to himself. "Yes, _He can do it_. These are the miracles He works now, instead of dividing seas and scattering hostile hosts." Meanwhile Madame Thomassian gathered up the needlework she had come to fetch--coarse garments for some of the many who needed them--and Jack could not help remembering the soft, luxurious life, surrounded by every indulgence wealth could procure, which had once been hers. Now she toiled on from day to day, content with the pittance which was all Miss Celandine had to give to the poor women who were thus employed, and contriving out of that pittance to feed the little waifs she had taken from the street. Even as she turned and went her way, he heard her softly singing to herself that favourite hymn of the persecuted Armenians:-- "Jesus, I my cross have taken All to leave and follow Thee; Destitute, despised, forsaken, Thou from hence my all shalt be; "Perish every fond ambition, All I've sought, or hoped, or known, Yet how rich is my condition! God and Heaven are still my own." Chapter XXII GIVEN BACK FROM THE DEAD "When we can love and pray over all and through all, the battle's past and the victory's come--glory be to God!" --"_Uncle Tom's Cabin._" One day Jack roused himself to go to the desolated house of the Vartonians. Very few of the surviving Armenians dared to be seen walking in their own Quarter; and, it was said by an eye-witness, no man was ever seen to walk upright there. They crept furtively about with bowed heads, slipping from shadow to shadow, afraid of the face of day and the eyes of their fellow men. Jack's object in going was to find, if possible, his father's note-book, which he had entrusted to Kevork to give Shushan in case of his own death. It was to him a very precious relic, and he thought it might probably be amongst the things that had escaped the plunderers, as there was nothing in its plain appearance and binding to attract them. It was agony to enter that blood-stained court, knowing all that had happened there, and to pass through those desolate rooms, associated in his mind with all the pleasant trifles of domestic life, thinking that every voice which he had heard there, save Gabriel's, was now hushed in death: every foot that trod those floors was dust. Even that dust had no quiet resting-place in the shadow of a Christian church. Those horrible trenches outside the gate, those hotbeds of fever and pestilence, told that, if the living were dumb, a cry that "shivered to the tingling stars" was going up from the desecrated dead.