The cab was rolling through the wide squares and streets of Bloomsbury.
In three or four minutes it would arrive at Euston.
"You will soon be in splendid health, old fellow," Hampson said, anxious
to turn the conversation into an ordinary and conventional channel.
"Meanwhile, I'll have a cigarette. You mustn't smoke, of course, but you
won't grudge me the single comfort that my poor health allows me?"
He felt in his pocket for the packet of cigarettes that he had bought
that morning. Then, quite suddenly, he paused.
A sense of the tremendous incongruity of the present situation came to
him.
He was riding in a London cab to a London station. He was going to see a
sick friend start in a modern train for healing airs and a quiet sojourn
among the hills.
And yet--and yet he firmly believed--almost knew, indeed--that this
friend, this man who was called Joseph, was, so to speak, under the
especial convoy of the Holy Ghost!
It was incredible! Were there indeed miracles going on each day in the
heart of modern London? Was the world the same, even now, as it was in
the old, dim days when Jesus the Lord walked among the valleys and the
hills of Palestine?
Euston and cabs, and yet the modern world was full of mystery, of
wonder. Yes, indeed, God ruled now as He had always ruled.
Joseph was going towards some divinely-appointed goal! He had been told
nothing of the vision which had made Lluellyn Lys, the recluse of Wales,
write to Mary, commanding her to send him to his mountains. He was
moving blindly to meet his destiny.
Yet soon Joseph also would know what his friends knew. And with that
knowledge--
Hampson's thoughts had passed through his brain in a single instant,
while he was feeling for the cigarettes. He withdrew his hand
mechanically from his pocket and found that it grasped a letter--a
letter which had not been opened.
"Hullo," he said, "I have quite forgotten about my letter! It came by
the afternoon post just as I was leaving my room to go to the hospital
and meet you. I put it in my pocket and then thought no more about it."
He began to open the type-written envelope.
Joseph said nothing, but gazed out upon the panorama of the London
streets with dreamy eyes. He was thinking deeply.
Suddenly he was startled by an exclamation from Hampson.
Turning, he saw that the little man's face was alive with excitement and
flushed with pleasure.
"What is it, my dear fellow?" he asked.
"The most wonderful thing, Joseph! Fortune and prosperity at last! The
big newspaper firm of Rees--Sir David Rees is the head of it--have
offered me the editorship of their religious weekly, _The Sunday
Friend_. I have written a dozen articles or so for them from time to
time, and I suppose this is the result! I am to go and see Mr. Marston,
the managing editor, to-morrow."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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