“Yes, he said, ‘Father’ had commanded him to go into the wilderness to fast.  He was always talking familiarly with ‘Father,’ as we walked.  So I stayed by him longer than I meant to—­he seemed so helpless—­and I happened at that time to be looking for the true God.”

“Did you find him, Bernal?”

“Oh, yes!”

“In this strange man?”

“In myself.  It’s the same old secret, Nance, that people have been discovering for ages—­but it is a secret only until after you learn it for yourself.  The only true revelation from God is here in man—­in the human heart.  I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance—­I’d had so much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me—­but I mustn’t bore you with it.”

“Oh, but I must know, Bernal—­you don’t dream how greatly I need at this moment to believe something—­more than you ever did!”

“It’s simple, Nance.  It’s the only revelation in which the God of yesterday gives willing place to the better God of to-day—­only here does the God of to-day say, ’Thou shalt have no other God before me but the God of to-morrow who will be more Godlike than I. Only in this way can we keep our God growing always a little beyond us—­so that to-morrow we shall not find ourselves surpassing him as the first man you would meet out there on the street surpasses the Christian God even in the common virtues.  That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted, Nance—­faith in a God that a fearless man could worship.”

He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent look still in his eyes.  By it she realised how far away from her he was—­realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation.  He smoked a while before speaking.

“Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long time—­the years went before I knew it.  At first I stayed with this healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they found him dead.  He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that he would live until he accomplished it.  But there he was, dead for want of a little food.  Then I stayed a long time alone—­until I began to feel that I, too, had something for the world.  It began to burn in my bones.  I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn’t saved it—­not even knowing it was lost.  But I kept thinking—­a man can be so much more than himself when he is alone—­and it seemed to me that I saw at least two things the world needed to know—­two things that would teach men to stop being cowards and leaners.”

Her sympathy was quick and ardent.

“Oh, Bernal,” she said warmly, “you made me believe when you believed nothing—­and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me believe again!  And you’ve come back with a message!  How glorious!”

He smiled musingly.

“I started with one, Nance—­one that had grown in me all those years till it filled my life and made me put away everything.  I didn’t accept it at first.  It found me rebellious—­wanting to live on the earth.  Then there came a need to justify myself—­to show that I was not the mere vicious unbeliever poor grandad thought me.  And so I fought to give myself up—­and I won.  I found the peace of the lone places.”