sound that had shocked his torture. The word wailed, mocked, reproached,
defied--and yet it was a prayer. Out of a soul in mortal stress that
word comes sometimes driven by a force of the spirit like the force of
the lungs fighting for breath--and it is a prayer.

"God, God, God!" the broken voice repeated, and sobs cut the words. And
again. Over and over, and again the sobbing broke it.

As suddenly as if a knife had stopped the life inside the body, all
sound stopped. A movement shook the man as he lay face down, arms
stretched. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was quiet, with a quiet
that meant muscles stretched, nerves alert. Slowly, slowly the tightened
muscles of the arms pushed the shoulders backward and upward; the head
lifted; the face turned outward, and if an observer had been there he
might have seen by the glow of the firelight that the features wet,
distorted, wore, more than all at this moment, a look of amazement.
Slowly, slowly, moving as if afraid to disturb something--a dream--a
presence--the man sat erect as he had been sitting before, only that the
rigidity was in some way gone. He sat alert, his eyes wide, filled with
astonishment, gazing before him eagerly--a look different from the dull
stare of an hour ago by the difference between hope and despair. His
hands caught at the stuff of the divan on either side and clutched it.

All the time the look of his face changed; all the time, not at once,
but by fast, startling degrees, the gray misery which had bound eyes and
mouth and brow in iron dropped as if a cover were being torn off and a
light set free. Amazement, doubting, incredulous came first, and with
that eagerness, trembling and afraid. And then hope--and then the fear
to hope. And hunger. He bent forward, his eyes peered into the quiet
emptiness, his fingers gripped the cloth as if to anchor him to a