Maud had never yet in her life seen any to whom the great White Presence has drawn near, but now, when she looked at the bed and the face of the man who lay there, she knew that the supreme moment must nearly have come, so unlike life was what she saw. Sandie, the gillie whom she had known so well, with whom year after year she had passed so many pleasant and windy days on the moor or by the brown sparkling river, was barely recognisable. The grey, pallid mask, with skin drawn tight over the protruding bones of the face, was scarcely human. Both upper and lower lips, already growing bluish in tinge, were drawn back, so that in both jaws the teeth were exposed even to the gums, and his eyes, wide open and bright and dry, looked piteously this way and that, with pupils dilated with terror, and the soul, frightened at this dark and lonely journey on which none could be its companion, sought for comfort and reassurement, but sought in vain. It was no delirium of fever that caused that active scrutiny: it was fear and dumb appeal. His hands, thin and white, lay outside the blanket, and they, too, were active, picking at it. Cochrane had seen that before, and knew what it meant, and he quickly pulled a chair to the bedside, leaving Maud standing. "Sandie," he said, "just listen here a minute. You think you are ill, maybe you think you are dying--at least, your mortal mind tells you that--and you've let yourself believe it. Now, there's not an atom of truth in it. Why, man, God is looking after you, and He has sent me here this evening to remind you of that. Your forgetting that has made your poor body sick. That's all the trouble." Maud looked from that mask on the pillow to the man who sat by the bed, and if the one face was dark with the shadow of death that lay over it, the other was so lit and illumined with life that it seemed possible even now that death, for all his grimness and nearness, might have to retreat. Some force, irresistible and radiant, seemed to be challenging him. But as yet she did not dare hope. She could only wait and watch. Then there was silence. Cochrane took his mind off all else, off poor Sandie even, to abandon himself to the knowledge, the belief in the only Power that healed and lived. Though the evening was cool, the beads of perspiration stood thick on his forehead as he concentrated all his strength, all his power of belief, into the realisation of this. Then, again, after some quarter of an hour, he raised his head, and looked on the glassy, dying face on the pillow, and spoke more eagerly, more insistently than ever.