The speech pierced John Hare's drift of dreams, and its import, grim in sullen expostulation, stung to life his fainting spirit. He opened his eyes. The desert stretched there, the appalling thing that had over powered him with its deceiving purple distance. Near him stood sombre-clad figures, two apart from the others, a gray-bearded giant watching with grave eyes the one who had spoken. Stern silence brooded between them, a silence of conviction, for in the little man's words, in his outspread palms, in the ?ame 'of \his eyes, spoke the truth.