All very well, but he must be quick about it if these holidays were to see him bring it off. Only three days!

Then Aunt Amy announced that she intended on this fine afternoon to pay a call on Miss Nightingale who lived in the Precincts, and to her great surprise Jeremy suggested that he should accompany her.

She was rather flattered, and when it was discovered that Miss Jones and Helen were also going that way and could pick Jeremy up and bring him home, she agreed to the plan. Jeremy and she were old, old enemies; he had insulted her again and again, played jokes upon her, had terrible storms of temper with her; but once, when a wretched little boy had laughed at her, he had fought the little boy and she had never forgotten that. As he grew older something unregenerate in her insisted on admiring him; he was such a thorough boy, so sturdy and manly. She adored the way that his mouth went up at the corners when he laughed; she liked his voice when it was hoarse with a serious effort to persuade somebody of something. Then, although he had so often been rude to her, she could not deny that he was a thorough little gentleman in all that she meant by that term. His manners, when he liked, could be beautiful, quite as good as Helen’s and much less artificial. If you cared for boys at all—which Aunt Amy must confess that she did not—then Jeremy was the sort of boy to care for. She had, in fact, both a family and an individual pride in him.

He was very funny to-day walking up the High Street; she could not understand him at all.

“Would you jump, Aunt Amy, if you suddenly saw the Black Bishop on his coal black horse, with his helmet and suit of mail, riding along down the High Street?”

“The Black Bishop? What Black Bishop?”

Was the boy being impertinent to dear Bishop Crozier, whose hair was in any case white, who had certainly never ridden a coal-black horse....

Jeremy carefully explained.

“Oh! the one in the cathedral! Oh! but he was dead and buried long ago!”

“Yes; but if he should come to life! He was strong enough for anything.”

“What an idea!” She couldn’t think where the boy got those strange irreligious ideas from—from her brother Samuel, she supposed!

“The dead don’t come back like that, Jeremy dear,” she explained gently. “How do you do, Miss Mackenzie? Oh, much better, thank you. It was only a little foolish toothache. It isn’t right of us to suppose they do. God doesn’t mean us to.”

“I don’t believe God could stop the Black Bishop coming back if he wanted to,” said Jeremy.

Aunt Amy would have been terribly shocked had she not seen a most remarkable hat in Forrest’s window that was only thirteen and eleven.

“What did you say, dear? With a little bit of blue at the side.... Oh, but you mustn’t say that, dear. That’s very wicked. God can do everything.”

“Saladin didn’t believe in God,” said Jeremy, winking at Tommy Winchester who was in charge of his mother on the other side of the street. “At least not in your God, or father’s. His God....”

“Oh, there’s Mrs. Winchester! Take off your hat, Jeremy. I’m sure it’s going to snow before I get back. Perhaps Miss Nightingale will be out and I’m sure I shan’t be sorry. You mustn’t say that, Jeremy. There’s only one God.”

“But if there’s only one God——” he began, then broke off at the sight of a dog, strangely like Hamlet. Not so nice though—not nearly so nice.

He was returning to his consideration of the Deity, the Black Bishop and Saladin, when, behold, they were already in the Precincts.

“Now, you’ll be all right, Jeremy dear, won’t you, just for a minute or two? Miss Jones can’t be long.”

All right! Of course he would be all right!

“If you like to wait here and just see, perhaps Miss Nightingale won’t be in, and then we could go back together.”

No, he thought he wouldn’t wait because he had promised Miss Jones who would be on the other side of the cathedral. Very well, then.

He watched his aunt ring Miss Nightingale’s very neat little door bell, and saw her then admitted into Miss Nightingale’s very neat little house. At that moment the cathedral chimes struck a quarter past four. He stepped across the path, pushed up the heavy leather flap of the great door and entered. Afternoon service, which began at half past three, was just ending. Some special saint’s day. Far, far away in the distance the canon’s voice beautifully echoed. The choir responded. “The peace of God that passeth all understanding.... Passeth all understanding! Passeth all understanding,” repeated the thick pillars and the high-arched roof, dove-coloured now in the dusk, and the deep, black-stained seats. “Passeth all understanding! All understanding!” The flag-stones echoed deep, deep into the ground. The organ rolled into a voluntary; white flecks of colour splashed for a moment against the screen and were gone. Two or three people, tourists probably, came slowly down the nave, paused for a moment to look at the garrison window with the Christ and the little children, and went out through the west end door. The organ rolled on, the only sound now in the building.

Jeremy was suddenly frightened. Strange that a place which had always seemed to him the last word in commonplace should now terrify him. It was different, alive, moving in the heart of its shadows, whispering.

He walked down the side aisle looking at every tablet, every monument, every window, with a new interest. The aliveness of the church walked with him; it was as though, as he passed them, they gathered themselves and followed in a long, grey, silent procession after him. He reached the side chapel where was the tomb of the Black Bishop. There he lay, safely enclosed behind the golden grill, his gauntleted hands folded on his chest, his spurs on his heels, angels supporting his head, and grim defiance in his face.

Jeremy stared and stared and stared again. About him and around him and above him the cathedral seemed to grow vaster and vaster. Clouds of dusk filled it; the colour from the windows and the tombs and the great gold trumpeting angels stained the shadows with patches of light.

Jeremy was cold and shivered; he looked up, and there, opposite him, standing on the raised steps leading to the choir, was the Black Bishop. He was there just as Jeremy had fancied him, standing, his legs a little apart, one mailed fist resting on his sword, his thick black beard sweeping his breast-plate. He was staring at Jeremy and seemed to be challenging him to move.

The boy could only stare back. Some spirit in him seemed to bid him remember that this was true, whatever soon might disprove it, that the past was the present and the present the past, that nothing ever died, that nothing must frighten him because it survived, and that he must take his share in his inheritance.

All that he really thought was: “I wonder if he’ll come nearer.” But he did not. Jeremy himself moved and suddenly the whole cathedral stirred, the mist breaking, steps sounding on the flags, voices echoing. No figure was there—only shadow. But here was that horrid fat man, the precentor, who sometimes came to their house to tea.

“Why, my boy, what are you doing here?” he asked in his big superior voice.

“I came in,” said Jeremy, still staring at the steps of the choir, “just for a moment.”

The precentor put his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “That’s right, my lad,” he said. “Study our great church and all its history. You cannot begin too young. Father well, and mother well?”

“Yes,” said Jeremy, looking back behind him as he turned away. Oh! but his face had been fine! So strong, like a rock, his sword had shone and his gauntlets! How tall he had been, and how mighty his chest.

“That’s right! That’s right. Remember me to them when you get home. You must come up and play with my little girls one of these afternoons.”

“I’m going back to school,” Jeremy said, “day after to-morrow.”

“Well, well. That’s a pity, that’s a pity. Another day, perhaps. Good day to you. Good day.”

Chanting, he went along, and Jeremy stood outside the cathedral staring about him. Lights were blowing in the wind; the dusk was blue and grey. The air was thick with armoured men marching in a vast procession across the sky. The wind blew, they flashed downwards in a cloud, wheeling up into the sky again as though under command.

The air cleared; the huge front of the cathedral was behind him, and before him, under the Precinct’s lamp, Miss Jones and Helen.

“Why, Jeremy, where have you been? We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We were just going home.”

“Come on,” Jeremy growled. “It’s late.”