All at once a thinning cloud-haze let the light glow through.
Beatrice looked at Stern. He shook his head.
“Not yet,” he answered.
Swiftly uprose the sun. The morning wind dispelled the shrouding vapors.
“Oh, what is this warmth?” exclaimed the patriarch, trembling violently. “What is this warmth, this glow upon my face? This life, this--”
Out toward the east he stretched both hands. Instinctively the priestlike worship of the sun, old when the world was still in infancy, surged back to him again after the long, lost centuries of darkness and oblivion.
“The sun! The sun!” he cried, his voice triumphant as a trumpet-call. Tears coursed from his blind eyes; but on his lips a smile of joy unutterable was set.
“The sun! At last! The--”
Stern caught his feeble body as he fell.
Down on the sands they laid him. To the stilled heart Stern laid his ear.