"Lift up your head."
He obeyed, and the first sight he saw was the face of Père Antoine bent above him. Again he was struck with its likeness to the traditional face of Christ—but the face was that of a Jesus who had grown grey in suffering and had been often crucified, who was very ancient and had not yet attained his death. Then he thought he knew what le Père had meant by saying that he must look for help from outside himself. He turned his eyes away and gazed into the sunshine, and on the greenness of the awakened country. Somehow it all looked very happy and changed from what it had been before they two had met. He vaguely wondered whether already he might not be now experiencing that help. But, as had always happened to him after tasting of a momentary joy, in turning his head he found a new grief awaiting him, for there, twenty paces distant, stretched out at the edge of the underbrush, covered with a robe, he caught sight of that recumbent figure, lying motionless as if it slept. He shuddered, and seizing the priest by the arm, speaking hoarsely with suppressed excitement, exclaimed, "Where did he come from? But where did you find him?"
"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled up-stream toward the bend."
"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by the bank. Père Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words were those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"
"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the truth about himself."
"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear that."
"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and Cain became a vagabond in the earth."
They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to speak to me, what question would He ask?"