He was very tired. What harm in lying down somewhere in a corner, for five minutes? He need not shut his eyes. He rolled his coat up for a pillow, and threw it against the wall beneath the window. The next instant he had stretched his stalwart limbs along the floor, and before ten minutes of his seventh half hour were spent—long before Faith, who thought herself all alone in the great building, had lost consciousness of her strange position—he was fast asleep.
Fast asleep, here, in the third story!
So, since the days of the disciples, men have grown heavy and forgotten their trust. So they have slumbered upon decks, at sea. So sentinels have lain down at picket posts, though they knew the purchase of that hour of rest might be the leaden death!
Faith Gartney dreamed, uneasily.
She thought herself wandering, at night, through the deserted streets of a great city. She seemed to have come from somewhere afar off, and to have no place to go to.
Up and down, through avenues sometimes half familiar, sometimes wholly unknown, she went wearily, without aim, or end, or hope. "Tired! tired! tired!" she seemed to say to herself. "Nowhere to rest—nobody to take care of me!"
Then—city, streets, and houses disappeared; the scenery of her dream rolled away, and opened out, and she was standing on a high, bare cliff, away up in wintry air; threatening rocky avalanches overhanging her—chill winds piercing her—and no pathway visible downward. Still crying out in loneliness and fear. Still with none to comfort or to help.
Standing on the sheer edge of the precipice—behind her, suddenly, a crater opened. A hissing breath came up, and the chill air quivered and scorched about her. Her feet were upon a volcano! A lake of boiling, molten stone heaved—huge, brazen, bubbling—spreading wider and wider, like a great earth ulcer, eating in its own brink continually. Up in the air over her, reared a vast, sulphurous canopy of smoke. The narrowing ridge beneath her feet burned—trembled. She hovered between two destructions.
Instantly—in that throbbing, agonizing moment of her dream, just after which one wakes—she felt a presence—she heard a call—she thought two arms were stretched out toward her—there seemed a safety and a rest near by; she was borne by an unseen impulse, along the dizzy ridge that her feet scarce touched, toward it; she was taken—folded, held; smoke, fire, the threatening danger of the cliff, were nothing, suddenly, any more. Whether they menaced still, she thought not; a voice she knew and trusted was in her ear; a grasp of loving strength sustained her; she was utterly secure.
So vividly she felt the presence—so warm and sure seemed that love and strength about her—that waking out of such pause of peace, before her senses recognized anything that was real without, she stretched her hands, as if to find it at her side, and her lips breathed a name—the name of Roger Armstrong.