"Who sent you here?" they cried, in harshly grating voices.
"My brother Roger!" he answered.
"Breathe the prayer dearest to your heart!" they grinned.
"May he wallow in a hell a thousand times blacker and more painful than this," he said.
"Your prayer shall be granted," they screamed.
Then I lost him amidst gloomy caverns, that burned with fires giving no light, and I realised that I was still tramping madly on towards the south-east, but I knew his prayer was answered—my hell was blacker than his.
Oh! the length of that awful night. Every second seemed a minute, every minute seemed a day, nay, a night, a thousand dark nights! I was in eternal punishment! I had died into eternal death!
How many hours I had tramped on I knew not, when I saw in the eastern sky a red tinge which made the whole horizon seem a wall of heated steel, set in diamonds. North and south the sky appeared more blue because of the brighter colour in the east, and it looked more distant, more unfathomable. Of what moment was this earth of ours in this vast space which separated it from the nearest star? It was but as the fine dust of the balance, and yet I, the loathsome thing that walked the earth, could feel—could suffer—I was something more than the earth!
Slowly the day dawned, brighter and brighter became the flush in the east, one by one the stars sank out of sight, and suddenly I saw a golden streak of light flash across the hills, then another, and still others, until a disc of the king of day became visible. A minute more and it was day! Day! and yet I was still in night, the gloomy fires of my heart were still unquenched, the darkness of my soul was still unillumined.
I now began to think about what my mother would say, what she would feel. When Wilfred did not come home a search would naturally be made, and in time he would be found. And what then? I dared not think of that!