Long sad thoughts of all her reasons against prayer, strongest among them the futility of her husband’s prayers, passed through her mind with their train of haunting memories, but in the cessation from argument which these pictures of the past produced, the words arose again dearly within her soul, like airdrops rising from the depths of a well and expanding into momentary iridescence on the surface, “Pray for help.  If you have no faith in God’s arm, you have the more need to seek it.”

Stung by the fear that she was losing her mind, she rose as she would have faced a human antagonist.

“God’s arm!” she said aloud, “my husband prayed such prayers, but I will ask nothing till I see his request fulfilled.”

She spoke the quick words with an almost reckless sense of experiment.  Her thought was that before she could honestly think of such prayer she must see some fruit of Angel’s petitions for this man Smith and for her own safety.

“Save Smith from further degradation,” she said, her breath coming sharply.  “Save me now, if that sort of prayer is right.  Do this in answer to my husband’s prayers.  Remember his prayers.”

She had begun recklessly, supposing that she was contending only with her own sick fancy; she was astonished that a few swift moments had involved her in an increasing sense of personal contact, and she became awed by the strength of the encounter.

“My husband prayed for my safety,” she repeated with softened attitude; then, as if seeking for the protection which had died with him, she repeated again and again, “Remember his prayers.”

She left the challenge at last apparently to die where she had breathed it in the dark cold air of her lonely room.  The tension of her mind relaxed.

She sat down again, not knowing whether anything had occurred, but a crisis in the morbid working of her strained nerves had in some way relieved her.

She was curiously unable to go back to her former agonised anxieties.  Natural fatigue, even sleepiness, came over her, but not her fears, even though she wooed them.

“Ah, well,” she said within herself, “it is quite true that it is useless to consider when I can give myself no help.”

The habits of the Saints were early.  When she heard silence fall upon the great house she went into her sleeping-room and lay down upon the bed.  Sleep came quickly.

With the early dawn she opened her eyes.  In the first moments of half-awaked consciousness she was aware that one thought lay alone in the empty horizon of her mind, like a trace left by a dream that had passed, as a wisp of cloud may be left in an empty sky.

This thought was that she would at once go down to the river bank upon the southwest of the town.

When other thoughts awoke and crowded within her ken this thought appeared foolish, and still more so the strong influence it had left upon her will, for in the momentum of this influence she had risen without debating the point.