THE EVENING stood bewildered among street lamps, its gold tarnished by the city dust. A woman, gaudily decked and painted, leant over the rail of her balcony, a living fire waiting for its moths. Suddenly an eddy was formed in the road round a street-boy crushed under the wheels of a carriage, and the woman on the balcony fell to the floor screaming in agony, stricken with the grief of the great white-robed Mother who sits in the world's inner shrine.
YET I CAN never believe that you are lost to us, my king, though our poverty is great, and deep our shame. Your will works behind the veil of despair, and in your own time opens the gate of the impossible. You come, as unto your own house, into the unprepared hall, on the unexpected day. Dark ruins at your touch become like a bud nourishing unseen in its bosom the fruition of fulfilment. Therefore I still have hopenot that the wrecks will be mended, but that a new world will arise.
