There were a good many people who went up the mountain that night to find the enthusiasts, each with some purpose of interference and criticism.  They went secure in their own sentiments, but with minds tickled into the belief that they were to see and hear some strange thing.  They saw and heard not much, yet they did not remain wholly their own masters.  Perhaps the idea that Cameron’s assembly would be well worth seeing was gleaned partly from the lingering storm, for an approaching storm breeds in the mind the expectation of exciting culmination, but long before the different seekers had found the meeting place, which was only known to the loyal-hearted, the storm, having spent itself elsewhere, had passed away.

There was an open space upon a high slope of the hill.  Trees stood above it, below, around—­high, black masses of trees.  It was here old Cameron’s company had gathered together.  No woodland spot, in dark, damp night, ever looked more wholly natural and of earth than this.  Sophia Rexford and Alec Trenholme, after long wandering, came to the edge of this opening, and stopped the sound of their own movements that they might look and listen.  They saw the small crowd assembled some way off, but could not recognise the figures or count them.  Listening intently, they heard the swaying of a myriad leaves, the drip of their moisture, the trickle of rivulets that the rain had started again in troughs of summer drought, and, amidst all these, the old man’s voice in accents of prayer.

Even in her feverish eagerness to seek Winifred, which had sustained her so long, Sophia chose now to skirt the edge of the wood rather than cross the open.  As they went through long grass and bracken, here and there a fallen log impeded their steps.  A frog, disturbed, leaped before them in the grass; they knew what it was by the sound of its falls.  Soon, in spite of the rustle of their walking, they began to hear the old man’s words.

It seemed that he was repeating such passages of Scripture as ascribe the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  Whether these were strung together in a prayer, or whether he merely gave them forth to the night air as the poetry on which he fed his soul, they could not tell.  The night was much lighter now than when the storm hung over.  They saw Cameron standing on a knoll apart from his company, his face upturned to the cloudy sky.  Beyond him, over the lower ranks of trees, the thunder cloud they had feared was still visible, showing its dark volume in the southern sky by the frequent fiery shudderings which flashed through its length and depth; but it had swept away so far that no sound of its thunder touched their air; and the old man looked, not at it but at the calm, cloud-wrapped sky above.

“The Son of Man is coming in the clouds of heaven with power, and great glory.”

The words fell upon the silence that was made up of the subdued sounds of nature; it seemed to breathe again with them; while their minds had time to be taken captive by the imagery.  Then he cried,