Yet I must cry to Him, for who else was there? Of course there were Mary Mother and the holy saints: but—Oh, I hope it was not wicked!—it seemed as if in my agony I pushed them all aside, and went straight up to Him to whom all prayer must come at last. "Help me, Jesu Christ!" Where was Guy?—feeling, in his darkened chamber, as if his heart were breaking? Where was Sybil?—awake, perhaps, with a lighted lamp, wrestling between the one love of her heart and the pride of life. And where was God? Did He hear me? Would He hear? And the cry came again, wrung from my very life as if I must have help. "Help me, Jesu Christ! I have no help. I can do nothing. I can even think of nothing. I can bear no more. Help me, not because I deserve help, but because I want Thee!" And the darkness went on, and the quiet beats of the water-clock, and the low, musical cry of the watchmen outside; and the clang of arms as they changed guard: but no holy angel came down from Heaven to tell me that my prayer was heard, and that it should be to me even as I would. Was there no help?—was there no hope?—was there no God in Heaven? Oh, it cannot, cannot be that she will decide against him! Yet Lady Judith thinks she will. I cannot imagine why. Our own sweet Sybil, to whom he has seemed like the very life of her life! No, it can never be true! She will never, never give him up. *CHAPTER XIII.* _*WAITING FOR THE INEVITABLE*_*.* "Oh, hard to watch the shore-lights, And yet no signal make! Hardest, to him the back on Love, For Love’s own blessed sake! For me the darkness riseth, But not for me the light; I breast the waters’ heaving foam For love of Love, to-night." She has given him up,—my Guy, my hero, my king of men! No, I could never have believed it! One short month ago, if all the prophets and wise women and holy monks in Palestine had come in a body and told me this thing, I should have laughed them to scorn,—I should have thought the dead would rise first. Ah! this is not our Sybil who has played this part. The Sybil whom I loved, next to Guy himself, has vanished into nothingness, and in her stead has come a creature that wears her face, and speaks with her voice,—cold, calculating, false! It was again Lady Judith who told me. I thought I was prepared for this. But I found that I was not. By the crushing pain which struck me, I knew that I had not really believed it would be thus,—that I had clung, like a drowning man, to the rope which failed me in this extremity—that I had honestly thought that the God to whom I had cried all night long would have come and saved me. That Sybil should fail was bitterness enough. But what was I to do when Christ failed me? Either He could not hear at all, or He would not hear me. And I did not see that it was of much consequence which it was, since, so far as I was concerned, both came to the same thing.