The little Pilgrim looked at him with wistful eyes, for what he said was beyond her understanding.  ‘For us,’ she said, ’life is nothing but joy.  Oh, brother, is there then condemnation?’

’It is no condemnation; it is what they have chosen,—­it is to follow their own way.  There is no longer any one to interfere.  The pleaders are all silent; there is no voice in the heart.  The Father hinders them not, nor helps them, but leaves them.’  He shivered as if with cold; and the little Pilgrim felt that there breathed from the depths of darkness at their feet an icy wind which touched her hands and feet and chilled her heart.  She shivered too, and drew close to the rock for shelter, and gazed at the awful cliffs rising out of the gloom, and the paths that disappeared at her feet, leading down, down into that abyss; and her heart failed within her to think that below there were souls that suffered, and that the Father and the Son were not there.  He, the All-loving, the All-present,—­how could it be that He was not there?

‘It is a mystery,’ said the man who was her guide, and who answered to her thought.  ’When I set my foot upon this blessed land I knew that there, even there, He is.  But in that country His face is hidden, and even to name His name is anguish,—­for then only do men understand what has befallen them, who can say that name no more.’

‘That is death indeed,’ she cried; and the wind came up silent with a wild breath that was more awful than the shriek of a storm; for it was like the stifled utterances of all those miserable ones who have no voice to call upon God, and know not where He is nor how to pronounce His name.

‘Ah,’ said he, ’if we could have known what death was!  We had believed in death in the time of all great illusions, in the time of the gentle life, in the day of hope.  But in the land of darkness there are no illusions; and every man knows that though he should fling himself into the furnace of the gold, or be cut to pieces by the knives, or trampled under the dancers’ feet, yet that it will be but a little more pain, and that death is not, nor any escape that way.’

‘Oh, brother!’ she cried, ‘you have been there!’

He turned and looked upon her; and she read as in a book things which tongue of man cannot say,—­the anguish and the rapture, the unforgotten pang of the lost, the joy of one who has been delivered after hope was gone.

’I have been there; and now I stand in the light, and have seen the face of the Lord, and can speak His blessed name.’  And with that he burst forth into a great melodious cry, which was not like that which he had sent into the dark depths below, but mounted up like the sounding of silver trumpets and all joyful music, giving a voice to the sweet air and the fresh winds which blew about the hills of God.  But the words he said were not comprehensible to his companion, for they were in the sweet tongue which is between the Father and His child, and known