'O God, where art thou?' he said in his heart, and went to his own
room to look out.
There was no curtain, and the blind had not been drawn down,
therefore the earth looked in at the storm-window. The sea neither
glimmered nor shone. It lay across the horizon like a low level
cloud, out of which came a moaning. Was this moaning all of the
earth, or was there trouble in the starry places too? thought
Robert, as if already he had begun to suspect the truth from
afar--that save in the secret place of the Most High, and in the
heart that is hid with the Son of Man in the bosom of the Father,
there is trouble--a sacred unrest--everywhere--the moaning of a tide
setting homewards, even towards the bosom of that Father.
CHAPTER VIII.
A HUMAN PROVIDENCE.
Robert kept himself thoroughly awake the whole night, and it was
well that he had not to attend classes in the morning. As the gray
of the world's reviving consciousness melted in at the window, the
things around and within him looked and felt ghastly. Nothing is
liker the gray dawn than the soul of one who has been watching by a
sick bed all the long hours of the dark, except, indeed, it be the
first glimmerings of truth on the mind lost in the dark of a godless
life.
Ericson had waked often, and Robert had administered his medicine
carefully. But he had been mostly between sleeping and waking, and
had murmured strange words, whose passing shadows rather than
glimmers roused the imagination of the youth as with messages from
regions unknown.
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