Then followed an unspeakable time of heart-rending anxiety. The pneumonia spread, and all the efforts of Jeffson and of a consultant from London to stop it proved unavailing. I found myself face to face with the crushing and incredible blow of the death of a dear one who was younger than myself. The passing onwards of our beloved must always be a sorrow to us; but if they are older than ourselves, the sorrow seems more or less a natural one. But when they are our juniors--and especially when they are considerably our juniors--the agony becomes unnatural, even monstrous. It is against nature for the young ones to be taken and the old ones to be left: an anguish unbearable save to those blessed souls who have grasped the great truth that death, after all, is only a semicolon--not a full stop. To me, during those dreadful days of Fay's illness, the sun seemed to be turned into darkness and the moon into blood; there was no light anywhere, and I realised that if her sun went down while it was yet day, there would be nothing henceforth for me but dreary twilight until the dawn of the resurrection morning. Of course I prayed, but the heavens were as brass above me: none answered, nor were there any that regarded, and my soul went down into the darkness and the shadow of death. "Let us send for Mr. Henderson," I said to Arthur, as soon as I knew how ill my darling was. "If he saved Frank, he could save her." But Arthur shook his head. "I thought of that, and telephoned for him to come. But I find he has gone on a trip to the Holy Land, and will not be back for weeks and weeks. If he started back at once, he would not be here in time to do anything for Fay, and besides, they do not know exactly where to find him." So that hope was extinguished. On the eighth day--to me it seemed the eighth century--of Fay's illness, I awoke in the morning (if one can call it waking when one hardly sleeps) with certain words of Mr. Henderson's ringing in my ears; words to which I had attached no importance at the time, which I had never thought of since, but which suddenly came back to me now with an emphasis they had not borne at first. The materialist, with his deeper credulity and more unreasoning faith, would put this phenomenon down to some strange and inexplicable vagary on the part of my subconscious self; but my simpler and less complex mind was satisfied with the more obvious explanation that God had, after all, heard my prayer, and had let my cry come unto Him. "I do not know, but I think you have the gift of healing," Henderson had said to me just as he was leaving the Rectory, "utterly uncultivated and undeveloped, but ready for Christ's use should He need it." And when I woke from my restless dozing on that particular morning, those words of Mr. Henderson's were ringing in my ears as plainly as if he had just uttered them.