Examining it with his hands, he believed it the same he had
ascended in the morning: even in a great castle, could there be two
such royal stairs? He sat down upon it, and leaning his head on his
hands, composed himself to a patient waiting for the light.
Waiting pure is perhaps the hardest thing for flesh and blood to do
well. The relations of time to mind are very strange. Some of
their phenomena seem to prove that time is only of the
mind--belonging to the intellect as good and evil belong to the
spirit. Anyhow, if it were not for the clocks of the universe, one
man would live a year, a century, where another would live but a
day. But the mere motion of time, not to say the consciousness of
empty time, is fearful. It is this empty time that the fool is
always trying to kill: his effort should be to fill it. Yet nothing
but the living God can fill it--though it be but the shape our
existence takes to us. Only where he is, emptiness is not.
Eternity will be but an intense present to the child with whom is
the Father.
Such thoughts alighted, flitted, and passed, for the first few
moments, through the mind of Donal, as he sat half consciously
waiting for the dawn. It was thousands of miles away, over the
great round of the sunward-turning earth! His imagination woke, and
began to picture the great hunt of the shadows, fleeing before the
arrows of the sun, over the broad face of the mighty world--its
mountains, seas, and plains in turn confessing the light, and
submitting to him who slays for them the haunting demons of their
dark.
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