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Perhaps in just such cold and stillness she would see His great shape passing by, dim and monstrous in the mist, like the shape of a big haystack or a barn. Her heart quickened strangely. She seemed to stand on the edge of revelation—half awake, numb with cold, running through the fog on her way to steal a turnip. . . .

The sunrise was breaking into the mist; among the white layers of it scars appeared, spreading and dripping with light. Suddenly the expected marvel showed itself to her, not in a monstrous, frightening shape, but as a globe of fire that hung suspended in the bare, laced twigs of a thornbush on the crown of the field. She saw—she knew. It was the Burning Bush. Burning but not consumed, it stood there on the meadow slope above her, lighting the world with its radiance, so that she saw her parents' cottage, and the turnip field, and the roofs of Pickdick, and Copthorne Church, all lit as when the fire flares up mysteriously out of ashes, and lights a gloaming room.

The fogs swept down over the Sign, and the moment passed; but as it passed she seemed to know all that it had been. This time the Lord had truly passed and spoken, touching the earth at dawn. Once more the field was grey and dim, full of dark shapes. But Susan's little breast was a cage of light, in which her heart skipped and sang like a bird. The field of revelation had moved from Beggars Bush to this slope above Pickdick and to this tranquil, drifting hour of early morning. At meeting next Sunday she would tell the Brethren, and they would murmur and gaze, as they had done four years ago when she told them about the Lord riding on a cloud . . . and this time there would be no blacksmith to doubt, to stare at her and burn her with his doubting eyes.