The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere
it leaves the heart; hence His answers may well come to us through the
channel of our own thoughts. But the world too being itself one of His
thoughts, He may also well make the least likely of His creatures an
angel of His own will to us. Even the blind, if God be with him, that
is, if he knows he is blind and does not think he sees, may become a
leader of the blind up to the narrow gate. It is the blind who says _I
see_, that leads his fellow into the ditch.

The window near which Dorothy kneeled, and toward which in the instinct
for light she had turned her face, looked straight down the garden, at
the foot of which the greater part of the circumference of the pond was
visible. But Dorothy, busy with her prayers, or rather with a weight of
hunger and thirst, from which like a burst of lightning skyward from the
overcharged earth, a prayer would now and then break and rush
heavenward, saw nothing of the outer world: between her and a sister
soul in mortal agony, hung the curtains of her eyelids. But there were
no shutters to her ears, and in at their portals all of a sudden darted
a great and bitter cry, as from a heart in the gripe of a fierce terror.
She had been so absorbed, and it so startled and shook her, that she
never could feel certain whether the cry she heard was of this world or
not. Half-asleep one hears such a cry, and can not tell whether it
entered his consciousness by the ear, or through some hidden channel of
the soul. Assured that waking ears heard nothing, he remains, it may be,
in equal doubt, whether it came from the other side of life or was the
mere cry of a dream. Before Dorothy was aware of a movement of her will,
she was on her feet, and staring from the window. Something was lying on
the grass beyond the garden wall, close to the pond: it looked like a
woman. She darted from the house, out of the garden, and down the other