"Better tell me now, Enra!"
'Enra' was the diminutive of 'Uaenra' and only those most intimate with him called him so.
"You speak very well, I understand it all. You don't make yourself a god, that's one thing, and what was the other?" she tried to help him as though he were a schoolboy who had forgotten his lesson.
"What was the other thing?" he began again and suddenly hurried on joyfully. "Do you remember the prayer 'Thou, Father art in my heart and no one knows Thee but me, Thy son?' I have said this and I don't go back on it. I never shall. This is as fixed in me as the stars in heaven. But this is so when I am not afraid, and when I am afraid, I pray to the Father: 'send someone else, someone else instead, I cannot!' And now, too, I am afraid. I keep thinking of the burden I have taken upon myself. Can a man bear it? What do you think, can he?"
"I don't know, Enra...."
"Don't you know either?"
The way he looked at her wrung her heart.
She clasped his knees and cried: "Yes, I do know: you can—you alone!"
He said nothing and buried his face in his hands. There was a long silence.
The stars came out. The Milky Way like a cloud rent in two stretched from one end of the desert to the other; the Pleiades glowed and the seven stars of Tuart, the Hippopotamus, glittered with a cold brilliance.