"Something great is going to happen. Now is the acceptable hour!" It was utterly outside her experience. It was a voice which chilled and frightened her. She didn't want to hear voices like this. Even as Mary spoke, Marjorie Kirwan heard a change in her voice. The brougham was quite still, and the long string of vehicles which were passing in the other direction were motionless also. Mary was staring out of the window at a hansom cab that was its immediate _vis-à-vis_. Two men were in the cab. One of them, a small, eager-faced man flushed with excitement, was bowing to Mary. The other, taller, and very pale of face, was looking at the hospital nurse with the wildest and most burning gaze the society girl had ever seen. "Who are they?" Marjorie whispered, though even as she asked she knew. "The man I saved from death," Mary answered, in a low, quivering voice, "and the man Joseph--Joseph!" She sank back against the cushions of the carriage in a dead faint. CHAPTER III NEARER Joseph turned to his companion. His face was white and worn by his long illness, but now it was suddenly overspread with a ghastly and livid greyness. He murmured something far down in his throat, and at the inarticulate sound, Hampson, who had been bowing with a flush of gratitude to Mary, turned in alarm. He saw a strange sight, and though he--in common with many others--was to become accustomed to it in the future, he never forgot his first impression. Joseph's head had sunk back against the cushions of the cab. His mouth was open, the jaw having fallen a little, as though he had no control of it. In a flash the terrible thought came to the journalist that his friend was in the actual throes of death. Then, in another second or two, just as the block in the traffic ceased, and the cab moved on again, he knew that Joseph lived. The eyes which at first were dark and lustreless--had seemed to be turned inward, as it were--suddenly blazed out into life. Their expression was extraordinary. It appeared to Hampson as if Joseph saw far away into an illimitable distance. So some breathless watcher upon a mountain-top, who searched a far horizon for the coming of a great army might have looked. A huge eagle circling round the lonely summit of an Alp might have such a strange light in its far-seeing eyes. At what was the man looking? Surely it was no narrow vision bounded by the bricks and mortar, the busy vista of the London Strand! Then, in a flash, the journalist knew. Those eyes saw no mortal vision, were not bounded by the material circumstance of place and time. They looked into the future. It was thus that Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah looked when the word of the Lord came to him. Unconsciously Hampson spoke a verse from Holy Writ:-- "Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth." Then Joseph began to speak, and never had his friend heard a man speak in this fashion.