There was a faint light from the stars that stabbed the deep violet sky. He moved slowly, thoughtfully, through paths as familiar to him as the rooms he occupied at home.
“And the Christ might come to-day!” he mused. “As Major H—— showed plainly from the Bible, there is no other prophetic event to transpire before His coming.”
Almost unconsciously he paused in his walking.
“If,” he cried softly, a certain fearsomeness in his voice, “if He came to-day, came now, what about me? Where should I come in?”
He recalled the fact that, according to the major’s showing, he, Tom Hammond, was quite unprepared for Christ’s coming, because he was still unsaved. He shivered slightly as the thought of his unpreparedness came to him.
With the flashing swiftness of one of memory’s freaks, there leaped into his mind some lines of Charles Wesley’s. He had written them, a day or two before, in illustration of a certain statement in an article on hymnology. They had not borne any message to his soul then, but now they seemed like the voicing of his own inmost thoughts.
He walked slowly on, the words falling from his lips in half-uttered notes.
“And am I only born to die?
And must I suddenly comply
With nature’s stern decree?