The picture of yesterday’s dawn recurred at intervals with unabating horror; and the steady consciousness that he was moving farther and farther from his own. Sanity was difficult in this suffering, but always as it reached a certain pressure of destructiveness, its voltage seemed queerly lowered, and he lost the sand and sky, and travelled through the deadly glitter that had neither surface nor line. This emerging at the moment of shattering always had to do with Rajananda. Somehow the old master would break the spell, and Romney would hear voices and feel again the swing of the camel’s tread. Presently all would sink away but the voice of the Ancient, who affirmed again and again neither the past nor the present, but what was to be: "Your work is not done. This is the stone death that you feel. It comes to ease the pain, and the pain comes from the red of flesh. When you have faith, all will be well—" "They tore her from me!" "All is well with her. You have chosen the way to God through a woman. It is the harder way. When you love enough, you will find peace—" "It is because I love her that I suffer so—" "My son talks as a child. It is because you do not love enough. In the great love there is no separation, save that of limbs and lips and hands. You have been taken for a brief season from that, in order that you may rise to the great love which laughs at death and distance and the intervention of men. Long ago you learned this, but my son has forgotten. The woman will remember more quickly and wait with serenity. Hold your hands to the sun. Rise to the love of the Long Road—and the lesson will soon be finished. She is waiting—" "Where—" "In good time you shall know." "Is there not to be a love on earth?" "Yes; the great races of the future—the races that shall heal the world—are to come from the love of earth—" "I want her here on earth. We had only met when she was taken away." "You cannot know the blessedness of the valley until you have crossed the heights—" "But we only just met, Father. All our lives we were apart." "There is another range of hills for you to cross—" "But she saw me carried from her as one dead—" "Even so, she is at peace in this hour. The faith of woman comes more quickly than the faith of man. She is one of the mothers of the new race. Her children cannot be borne alone among the little valley shrines of men. Her children must breathe the strong air of the hills." "But tell me, shall I meet her again here—down on the good earth?" "Your master cannot speak of that. If I should tell you what you ask, you could not turn your eyes upward from the dream of the valley-shrines.... Hold up your palms, my son. Master the red of flesh that will not let you wait in peace. So long as you can be destroyed by that, you are not ready for the greater meeting with the Beloved—" "I could die, but it would not be better than this—"