The little Pilgrim saw them depart from her with love and joy, and sat down upon the rocky edge and sang her own song of peace; for her fear was gone, and she was ready to do her service there upon the verge of the precipice as among the flowers and the sunshine, where her own place was.  ‘From the depths,’ she said, ’they come, they come!—­from the land of darkness, where no love is.  For Thy love, O Lord, is more than the darkness and the depths.  And where hope is not, there Thy pity goes.’  She sat and sang to herself like a happy child, for her heart had fathomed the awful gloom which baffles angels and men; and she had learned that though hope comes to an end and light fails, and the feet of the ambassadors are stayed on the mountains, and the voice of the pleaders is silenced, and darkness swallows up the world, yet Love never fails.  As she sang, the pity in her heart grew so strong, and her desire to help the lost, that she rose up and stepped forth into the awful gloom, and had it been permitted, in her gentleness and weakness would have gone forth to the deeps and had no fear.

The ground gave way under her feet, so dreadful was the precipice; but though her heart beat with the horror of it, and the whirl of the descent and the darkness which blinded her eyes, yet had she no hurt.  And when her foot touched the rock, and that sinking sense of emptiness and vacancy ceased, she looked around and saw the path by which that traveller had come.  For when the eyes are used to the darkness, the horror of the gloom was no longer like a solid thing, but moved into shades of darker and less dark, so that she saw where the rocks stood, and how they sank with edges that cut like swords down and ever down into the abysses; and how here a deep ravine was rent between them, and there were breaks and scars as though some one had caught the jagged points with wounded hand or foot, struggling up the perpendicular surface towards the little ray of light, like a tiny star which shone as on immeasurable heights to show where life was.  As she travelled deeper and deeper, it was a wonder to see how far that little ray penetrated down and down through gulfs of darkness, blue and cold like the shimmer of a diamond, and even when it could be seen no more, sent yet a shadowy refraction, a line of something less black than the darkness, a lightening amid the gloom, a something indefinable which was hope.  The rocks were more cruel than imagination could conceive,—­sometimes pointed and sharp like knives, sometimes smooth and upright as a wall with no hold for the climber, sometimes moving under the touch, with stones that rolled and crushed the bleeding feet; and though the solid masses were distinguishable from the lighter darkness of the air, yet it could only be in groping that the travellers by that way could find where any foothold was.  The traveller who came from above, and who had the privilege of her happiness, sank down as if borne on wings, yet needed all her courage not to