“God save me,” she voiced her first prayer. “I am sinking. I shall be lost. Are you there, O God? Only you can save my soul.”
Higher than the arch-blasphemer’s shrieks of derision, fugued the storm winds without. At their demand, the entrance doors swung wide; admitted them. Across the great room they swept, gentling only at the flutter of veilings about the girl-soul at bay against the wall.
Close after them lightnings slashed the darkness. Behind her head, from tip to tip of her upraised hands, thence to her sandled feet, they concentrated in rays of blinding light.
Crouched to spring, Satan fell back as if struck. In the down-shed blaze his face worked with superstition. His whine of a maddened dog slashed across the eyes with a whip, ended in two gasped words.
“The Cross!”
Into power unmeasured by watts or kilowatts increased the rays. They irradiated the face of her whose shape they framed with a beauty never before seen in Gehenna—the beauty of realized hope.
The uproar of the storm concentrated in one stupendous crash. From out the contrasting stillnesses, there then spoke a voice calmer and deeper than the deepest tone of the sea—“a voice ... as the voice of many waters and ... of a great thunder and ... of harpers harping with their harps”:
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Prone fell the Destroyer, lest he be destroyed. Face downward before that sign, which was the sign of his one fear, he writhed upon the floor. From his forked tongue of a snake hissed threats and pleas:
“Go away! How dare you trespass into the kingdom I have made for myself? Don’t blast me. You promised time until Judgment. I’ll give up the girl-shade. I’ll do anything you say. Don’t blast me now. I might, you know, repent.”