Such thoughts surged through her soul as she sat in the ravine. At length she knelt and consecrated herself again--as she had done a hundred times--to her people's God. With mute lips and phraseless purpose she waited upon the Lord to know His will. Oh, for some assurance that it was right to follow her own intent! The silence was for a time unbroken. At length a strange sound smote upon the ear. It was like nothing she had ever heard--a ringing note that seemed to come from the ground. Now another of different tone; and another still. These sounds were repeated in an order that suggested the notes of the music with which the players on instruments at the Temple accompanied the chanting of the familiar hymn: "Awake! Awake, Deborah! Awake! Awake! utter a song!" Neither harp, nor lute, nor tabret, nor cymbal could have produced these sounds. It was as if the rocks themselves had become mighty timbrels, and were stricken by some spirit of the woods. Surely this must be of superhuman agency: the noise was so unearthly, and the notes so clearly belonged to the words they suggested. It was not a voice; yet surely it was the Bath-kol, the Echo, the Daughter of the Voice, of which the now sainted Mattathias had spoken. She prostrated herself among the gnarled roots of a great terebinth that projected from the side of the ravine as if they were the horns of an altar. So, too, her soul clung to her Lord. She prayed in words that His will might be her will. Perhaps in thought she prayed that her will might be His will--a distinction she was too unskilled in moral anatomy to note. Again and again with ecstatic fervor she murmured her oft-repeated vow, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God!" She lay some moments in almost a trance of seraphic peace. This was changed to seraphic fury. Jehovah had accepted her. She was to be His messenger--a messenger of fire, of dagger, of deceit toward Israel's foes, as well as of consolation to His people. She rose, and stood with hands clasped behind her, her face upturned to the glowing line of light that spanned the ravine. She drank in the brightness as heaven's approbation. How long she remained in that attitude of rhapsody she did not know. The spell was suddenly broken. "There she is! Here, Caleb, is Deborah! Give me your hand, or she will be gone ere we reach her," cried Mephibosheth to his blind friend, as, spying Deborah at a distance, the children tried to reach her. But thus startled, she walked too fast for the lame boy, encumbered as he was with the care of his comrade. "Well, let her go. It is enough that she is safe," said Caleb.