"It'll be here now before long, father," answered Stern.
"From which direction does it come? Am I facing it?" he asked, with pitiful anxiety.
"You're facing it. The first rays will fall on you. Only be patient. I promise you it shall not fail!"
A pause. Then the aged man spoke again.
"Remember, oh, my children," said he, with terrible earnestness, "all that I have told you, all that you must know. Remember how to deal with my people. They are as children in your hands. Be very patient, very firm and wise; all will be well.
"Remember my warnings of the Great Vortex, so very far below our sea, the Lanskaarn, and all those other perils of the Abyss whereof I have spoken. Remember, too, all the traditions of the Cave of Records. Some day, when all else is accomplished, you may find that cave. I have told you everything I know of its location. Seek it some day, and find the history of the dead, buried past, from the time of the great catastrophe to the final migration when my ancestors sought the lower sea."
Another silence. All three were too deeply moved for any speech. And ever mounting higher, brighter and more clear, dawn flung its glories wide across the sky.
"Help me that I may stand, to greet the day!" at last the patriarch said. "I cannot rise, alone."
Stern and the girl, each taking an arm, got him to his feet. He stood there facing the east, priestlike in venerable and solemn worship of the coming sun.
"Give me each a hand, my children," he commanded. In Stern's hand, strong, corded, toil-worn, he laid the girl's.
"Thus do I give you each to each," said he. "Thus do I make you one!"
Stern drew Beatrice into his arms. Blind though the old man was, he sensed the act, and smiled. A great and holy peace had shrouded him.
"Only that I may feel the sun upon my face!" breathed he.
All at once a thinning cloud-haze let the light glow through.
Beatrice looked at Stern. He shook his head.
"Not yet," he answered.
Swiftly uprose the sun. The morning wind dispelled the shrouding vapors.
"Oh, what is this warmth?" exclaimed the patriarch, trembling violently. "What is this warmth, this glow upon my face? This life, this--"
Out toward the east he stretched both hands. Instinctively the priestlike worship of the sun, old when the world was still in infancy, surged back to him again after the long, lost centuries of darkness and oblivion.
"The sun! The sun!" he cried, his voice triumphant as a trumpet-call. Tears coursed from his blind eyes; but on his lips a smile of joy unutterable was set.