"I think he did very well," she answered, laughing. "What must it be down in the city--when we suffer so here? We cannot do without you----" "But there is great work for me--the great work I have always asked for. Believe me, I do not suffer." "One must not labor until he falls and dies, Father." "If it be the will of the good God, I ask nothing fairer than to fall in His service. Death is only terrible from afar off in youth, my dear child. When we are old and perceive the glories of the Reality, we are prone to forget the illusion here. In remembering immortality, we forget the cares and ills of flesh.... I am only troubled for my people, stifling in the gray curse of the city, and for my brave young friend. My mind was clouded when he asked me certain questions last night; and to-day, they say he has gone to the craters of the mountain." "What for?" she whispered quickly. "Ah, how should I know? But he tells me of people who make pilgrimages of sanctification to strange cities of the East--to Mecca and Benares----" "But they go to Benares to die, Father!" "I did not know, my daughter," he assured her, drawing his hand across his brow in a troubled fashion. "He has not gone to the mountain for that, though I see storms gathering about him, storms of the mountain and hatreds of men. But I see you with him afterward--as I saw him with you--when you first spoke to me." She told him all, and found healing in the old man's smile. "It is well, and it is wonderful," he whispered at last. "Much that my life has misunderstood is made clear to me--by this love of yours and his----" "'And his,' Father?" "Yes." There was silence. She would not ask if Quentin Charter had also told his story. Father Fontanel arose and said he must go back, but he took the girl's hands, looked deeply into her eyes, saying with memorable gentleness: "Listen, child,--the man who cannot forget a vision that is lost, will be a brave mate for the envisioned reality that he finds." At intervals all that afternoon she felt the influence of Bellingham. It was not desire. Dull and impersonal, it appealed, as one might hear a child in another house repeatedly calling to its mother. Within her there was no response, save that of loathing for a spectre that rises untimely from a past long since expiated. She did not ask herself whether she was lifted beyond him, or whether he was debased and weakened, or if he really called with the old intensity. Glimpses of the strange place in which he lodged occasionally flashed before her inner mind, but it was all far and indefinite, easily to be banished. To her, he had become inextricable from the reptiles. There was so much of living fear and greater glory in her mind that afternoon, that these were but evil shadows of slight account.