She shuddered as she lay. This was terrible. She ought to be so thankful. Ah! and she was thankful; but it was to man, not God. Once she opened her lips, and the cry, old as humanity, the 'Our Father,' that will instinctively break from the heart of Earth's children when they realise their weakness and the strength of the forces set in array against them, rose on a wave of anguish from her soul. But in the next instant the cry was withdrawn. Father! There was no Father, only a blind power that hurled the world-atoms, which for once in the measureless ages have shaped themselves into sentient lives, from steep to steep of a dead eternity. Awful, unutterable, sorrow piercing her heart, like barbed arrows, each of which leaves its sting in the wound, looking out pitifully from a myriad of eyes, making life impossible and death the only refuge to be hoped for! In the darkness Kit awoke and heard her laboured breathing. He groped for her hand, and, finding it cold, was frightened and stole out to awake Tom. He came in, lighted the lamps, and knelt down beside her. 'You are with friends,' he whispered, when he had made her drink a few drops of Bâl Narîn's cordial. 'You must have courage for a little while.' 'I will try,' she said plaintively. 'I should like to see them once more.' 'You will see them once more, and many times. When all this tangle is over, we must go back to England.' 'England!' murmured Grace. 'Ah! they are good there. One can believe, but,' shuddering, 'one cannot forget. I suppose we have to go out of life for that.' 'Grace, if you love us, if you love them, do not, for heaven's sake, speak so!' She raised her heavy eyes and looked at him. 'Poor boy!' she said softly. 'I am troubling him. And when he has done so much for me--all that way through the thicket! But the others, ah! Tom, the others!--there was no God to save them.' 'My dearest, in heaven's name, I beseech you, put these thoughts away! There was a God. There _is_ a God. Death opens the way into His kingdom.' 'I used to think so,' said Grace dreamily. 'That was long ago, before I knew, when I thought the world was good.' 'And so it is, Grace; so it is! Give yourself time, dearest, and you will come back to the old thoughts. You will know that the horror which it has pleased God to let you look upon is the exception, not the rule. It is like the tempest which comes and goes, and does its awful work. Peace returns afterwards.'