The night was very clear, very cold. The stars sparkled brilliantly, aloofly. There was a suspicion of frost-crackle in the thick covering of dew which lay like a filmy gossamer quilt over the grassy uplands. The startled sheep left a darker track of dew-despoiled herbage behind their flying footsteps. There was no cloud upon the sky whose velvet darkness seemed devoid of light save for the unhaloed moon and the sharp shining stars.
But Morris Pugh saw none of these things. He had found what he sought--what all Religions seek--the Self that is not yourself. He had found it through an abstraction of the mind, not through the manifold face of matter. But the sense of finality, of universal Oneness, comes in a thousand ways, and he felt it fully. He could have sung in the gladness of his heart, even while his stumbling feet bruised themselves over the unheeded stones.
The little rush-fringed pool, by which he had sat with the others asserting that money was the root of all evil, lay so still, so shining, so set, that it also might have been frost-bound--like the heart of man before the Mercy of the Most High had touched it.
The root of all evil!
Morris smiled. He knew better now. There was nothing evil in the Holiest of Holies. Money was a great gift.
So, as if before an altar, every atom of him, soul and body, thrilling with high expectation, he knelt before the cleft in the rock to receive what had been given. His very hands trembled.
"Not unto us, Lord, but unto Thy name," he murmured softly.
Then came a pause. His fingers, feeling the cleft, found it empty.
Empty! Incredible! Impossible! A great amaze took him. He stood up and stared vacantly at the receding whiteness of the dew-covered, moonlit steeps.
Empty!