my dressing-gown, threw a rug over his knees, and took my place opposite
to him on the other side of the fire; and thus we kept our strange
vigil, while slowly above us broke the grim, cold dawn of early
spring-time, which even the birds do not brighten with their babble.

Silently staring into the fire, he vouchsafed no further explanations,
and I did not venture to ask for any; but I doubt if even such language
as he could command would have been so full of horrible suggestion as
that grey set face, and the terror-stricken gaze, which the growing
light made every minute more distinct, more weird. What had so suddenly
and so completely overthrown, not his own strength merely, but the
defences of his faith? He groped amongst them still, for, from time to
time, I heard him murmuring to himself familiar verses of prayer and
psalm and gospel, as if he sought therewith to banish some haunting
fear, to quiet some torturing suspicion. And at last, when the dull grey
day had fully broken, he turned towards me, and cried in tones more
heart-piercing than ever startled the great congregations in church or
cathedral--

"What if it were all a delusion, and there be no Father, no Saviour?"

And the horror of that abyss into which he looked, flashing from his
mind to my own, left me silent and helpless before him. Yet I longed to
give him comfort; for, with the regal self-possession which had fallen
from him, there had slipped from me too some undefined instinct of
distrust and disapproval. All that I felt now was the sad tie of
brotherhood which united us, poor human atoms, strong only in our
capacity to suffer, tossed and driven, whitherward we knew not, in the
purposeless play of soulless and unpitying forces.