Falk Brandon knew quite well that his mother was watching him.

It was a strange truth that until this return of his from Oxford he had never considered his mother at all. It was not that he had grown to disregard her, as do many sons, because of the monotonous regularity of her presence. Nor was it that he despised her because he seemed so vastly to have outgrown her. He had not been unkind nor patronising nor contemptuous--he had simply not yet thought about her. The circumstances of his recent return, however, had forced him to consider every one in the house. He had his secret preoccupation that seemed so absorbing and devastating to him that he could not believe that every one around him would not guess it. He soon discovered that his father was too cock-sure and his sister too innocent to guess anything. Now he was not himself a perceptive man; he had, after all, seen as yet very little of the world, and he had a great deal of his father's self-confidence; nevertheless, he was just perceptive enough to perceive that his mother was thinking about him, was watching him, was waiting to see what he would do....

His secret was quite simply that, for the last year, he had been devastated by the consciousness of Annie Hogg, the daughter of the landlord of "The Dog and Pilchard." Yes. devastated was the word. It would not be true to say that he was in love with her or, indeed, had any analysed emotion for her--he was aware of her always, was disturbed by her always, could not keep away from her, wanted something in connection with her far deeper than mere love-making--

What he wanted he did not know. He could not keep away from her, and yet when he was with her nothing occurred. She did not apparently care for him; he was not even sure that he wanted her to. At Oxford during his last term he had thought of her--incessantly, a hot pain at his heart. He had not invited the disturbance that had sent him down, but he had welcomed it.

Every day he went to "The Dog and Pilchard." He drank but little and talked to no one. He just leaned up against the wall and looked at her. Sometimes he had a word with her. He knew that they must all be speaking of it. Maybe the whole town was chattering. He could not think of that. He had no plans, no determination, no resolve--and he was desperately unhappy....

Into this strange dark confusion the thought of his mother drove itself. He had from the very beginning been aware of his father in this connection. In his own selfish way he loved his father, and he shared in his pride and self-content. He was proud of his father for being what he was, for his good-natured contempt of other people, for his handsome body and his dominance of the town. He could understand that his father should feel as he did, and he did honestly consider him a magnificent man and far above every one else in the place. But that did not mean that he ever listened to anything that his father said. He pleased himself in what he did, and laughed at his father's temper.

He had perceived from the first that this connection of his with Annie Hogg might do his father very much harm, and he did not want to harm him. The thought of this did not mean that for a moment he contemplated dropping the affair because of his father--no, indeed--but the thought of the old man, as he termed him, added dimly to his general unhappiness. He appreciated the way that his father had taken his return from Oxford. The old man was a sportsman. It was a great pity that he should have to make him unhappy over this business. But there it was--you couldn't alter things.

It was this fatalistic philosophy that finally ruled everything with him. "What must be must." If things went wrong he had his courage, and he was helped too by his contempt for the world....

He knew his father, but he was aware now that he knew nothing at all about his mother.

"What's she thinking about?" he asked himself.

One afternoon he was about to go to Seatown when, in the passage outside his bedroom, he met his mother. They both stopped as though they had something to say to one another. He did not look at all like her son, so fair, tall and aloof, as though even in his own house he must be on his guard, prepared to challenge any one who threatened his private plans.

"She's like a little mouse," he thought to himself, as though he were seeing her for the first time, "preparing to run off into the wainscot" He was conscious, too, of her quiet clothes and shy preoccupied timidity--all of it he seemed to see for the first time, a disguise for some purpose as secret, perhaps, as his own.

"Oh, Falk," she said, and stopped, and then went on with the question that she so often asked him:

"Is there anything you want?"

"No, mother, thank you. I'm just going out."

"Oh, yes...." She still stayed there nervously looking up at him.

"I was wondering----Are you going into the town?"

"Yes, mother. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"No, thank you." Still she did not move.

"Joan's out," she said. Then she went on quickly, "I wish you'd tell me if there were anything----"

"Why, of course." He laughed. "What exactly do you mean?"

"Nothing, dear. Only I like to know about your plans."

"Plans? I haven't any."

"No, but I always think you may be going away suddenly. Perhaps I could help you. I know it isn't very much that I can do, but anything you told me I think I could help you about.... I'd like to help you."

He could see that she had been resolving for some time to speak to him, and that this little appeal was the result of a desperate determination. He was touched.

"That's all right, mother. I suppose father and you think I oughtn't to be hanging around here doing nothing." "Oh, your father hasn't said anything to me. I don't know what he thinks. But I should miss you if you went. It is nice for us having you, although, of course, it must seem slow to you here."

He stood back against the wall, looking past her out through the window that showed the grey sky of a misty day.

"Well, it's true that I've got to settle about doing something soon. I can't be home like this for ever. There's a man I know in London wants me to go in for a thing with him...."

"What kind of a thing, dear?"

"It's to do with the export trade. Travelling about. I should like that. I'm a bit restless, I'm afraid. I should want to put some money into it, of course, but the governor will let me have something.... He wants me to go into Parliament."

"Parliament?"

"Yes," Falk laughed. "That's his latest idea. He was talking about it the other night. Of course, that's foolishness. It's not my line at all. I told him so."

"I wouldn't like you to go away altogether," she repeated. "It would make a great difference to me."

"Would it really?" He had a strange mysterious impulse to speak to her about Annie Hogg. The thought of his mother and Annie Hogg together showed him at once how impossible that was. They were in separate worlds. He was suddenly angry at the difficulties that life was making for him without his own wish. "Oh, I'll be here some time yet, mother," he said. "Well, I must get along now. I've got an appointment with a fellow."

She smiled and disappeared into her room.

All the way into Seatown he was baffled and irritated by this little conversation. It seemed that you could not disregard people by simply determining to disregard them. All the time behind you and them some force was insisting on places being taken, connections being formed. One was simply a bally pawn...a bally pawn....

But what was his mother thinking? Had some one been talking to her? Perhaps already she knew about Annie. But what could she know? Girls like Annie were outside her ken. What could his mother know about life? The day did not help his dissatisfaction. The fog had not descended upon the town, but it had sent as its forerunner a wet sea mist, dim and intangible, depressing because it removed all beauty and did not leave even challenging ugliness in its place.

On the best of days Seatown was not beautiful. I have read in books romantic descriptions of Glebeshire coves, Glebeshire towns with the romantic Inn, the sanded floor, fishermen with gold rings in their ears and strange oaths upon their lips. In one book I remember there was a fine picture of such a place, with beautiful girls dancing and mysterious old men telling mysterious tales about ghosts and goblins, and, of course, somewhere in the distance some one was singing a chanty, and the moon was rising, and there was a nice little piece of Glebeshire dialect thrown in. All very pretty.... Seatown cannot claim such prettiness. Perhaps once long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown, in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. And the time came when it was disturbed....

Even the Pol, a handsome river enough out beyond the town in the reaches of the woods, was no pretty sight at low tide when there was nothing to see but a thin, sluggish grey stream filtering through banks of mud to its destination, the sea. At high tide the river beat up against the crazy stone wall that bordered Pennicent Street; and on the further side there were green fields and a rising hill with a feathery wood to crown it. From the river, coming up through the green banks, Seatown looked picturesque, with its disordered cottages scrambling in confusion at the tail of the rock and the Cathedral and Castle nobly dominating it. That distant view is the best thing to be said for Seatown.

To-day, in the drizzling mist, the place was horribly depressing. Falk plunged down into Bridge Street as into a damp stuffy well. Here some of the houses had once been fine; there were porticoes and deep-set doors and bow-windows, making them poor relations of the handsome benevolent Georgian houses in Orange Street. The street, top-tilting down to the river, was slovenly with dirt and carelessness. Many of the windows were broken, their panes stuffed with paper; washing hung from house to house. The windows that were not broken were hermetically sealed and filled with grimy plants and ferns, and here and there a photograph of an embarrassed sailor or a smiling married couple or an overdressed young woman placed face outward to the street. Bridge Street tumbled with a dirty absent- mindedness into Pennicent Street. This, the main thoroughfare of Seatown, must have been once a handsome cobbled walk by the river-side. The houses, more than in Bridge Street, showed by their pillared doorways and their faded red brick that they had once been gentlemen's residences, with gardens, perhaps, running to the river's edge and a fine view of the meadows and woods beyond. To-day all was shrouded in a mist that was never stationary, that seemed alive in its shifting movement, revealing here a window, there a door, now a chimney-pot, now steps that seemed to lead into air, and the river, now at full tide and lapping the stone wall, seemed its drunken bewildered voice.

"Bally pawns, that's what we are," Falk muttered again. It seemed to be the logical conclusion of the thoughts that had worried him, like flies, during his walk. Some one lurched against him as he stayed for a moment to search for the inn. A hot spasm of anger rose in him, so sudden and fierce that he was frightened by it, as though he had seen his own face in a mirror. But he said nothing. "Sorry," said a voice, and shadow faded into shadow.

He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest there was a dim chattering struggle at this point. Falk always connected this noise with the inn and the power or enchantment of the inn that held him--"Black Enchantment," perhaps. He was to hear that struggling chatter of the river until his dying day.

He pushed through the passage and turned to the right into the bar. A damp day like this always served Hogg's trade. The gas was lit and sizzled overhead with a noise as though it commented ironically on the fatuity of the human beings beneath it. The room was full, but most of the men-- seamen, loafers, a country man or two--crowded up to the bar. Falk crossed to a table in the corner near the window, his accustomed seat. No one seemed to notice him, but soon Hogg, stout and smiling, came over to him. No one had ever seen Samuel Hogg out of temper--no, never, not even when there had been fighting in the place and he had been compelled to eject men, by force of arms, through the doors and windows. There had not been many fights there. Men were afraid of him, in spite of his imperturbable good temper. Men said of him that he would stick at nothing, although what exactly was meant by that no one knew.

He had a good word for every one; no crime or human failing could shock him. He laughed at everything. And yet men feared him. Perhaps for that very reason. The worst sinner has some kind of standard of right and wrong. Himself he may not keep it, but he likes to see it there. "Oh, he's deep," was Seatown's verdict on Samuel Hogg, and it is certain that the late Mrs. Hogg had not been, in spite of her husband's good temper, a happy woman.

He came up to Falk now,--smiling, and asked him what he would have. "Nasty day," he said. Falk ordered his drink. Dimly through the mist and thickened air the Cathedral chimes recorded the hour. Funny how you could hear them in every nook and corner of Polchester.

"Likely turn to rain before night," Hogg said, as he turned back to the bar. Falk sat there watching. Some of the men he knew, some he did not, but to-day they were all shadows to him. Strange how, from the moment that he crossed the threshold of that place, hot, burning excitement and expectation lapped him about, swimming up to him, engulfing him, swamping him body and soul. He sat there drowned in it, not stirring, his eyes fixed upon the door. There was a good deal of noise, laughter, swearing, voices raised and dropped, forming a kind of skyline, and above this a voice telling an interminable tale.

Annie Hogg came in, and at once Falk's throat contracted and his heart hammered in the palms of his hands. She moved about, talking to the men, fetching drinks, unconcerned and aloof as she always was. Seen there in the mist of the overcrowded and evil-smelling room, there was nothing very remarkable about her. Stalwart and resolute and self-possessed she looked; sometimes she was beautiful, but not now. She was a woman at whom most men would have looked twice. Her expression was not sullen nor disdainful; in that, perhaps, there was something fine, because there was life, of its own kind, in her eyes, and independence in the carriage of her head.

Falk never took his eyes from her. At that moment she came down the room and saw him. She did not come over to him at once, but stopped and talked to some one at another table. At last she was beside him, standing up against his table and looking over his head at the window behind him.

"Nasty weather, Mr. Brandon," she said. Her voice was low and not unpleasant; although she rolled her r's her Glebeshire accent was not very strong, and she spoke slowly, as though she were trying to choose her words.

"Yes," Falk answered. "Good for your trade, though."

"Dirty weather always brings them in," she said.

He did not look at her.

"Been busy to-day?"

"Nothing much this morning," she answered. "I've been away at my aunt's, out to Borheddon, these last two days."

"Yes. I saw you were not here," he said. "Did you have a good time?"

"Middling," she answered. "My aunt's been terrible bad with bronchitis this winter. Poor soul, it'll carry her off one of these days, I reckon."

"What's Borheddon like?" he asked.

"Nothing much. Nothing to do, you know. But I like a bit of quiet just for a day or two. How've you been keeping, Mr. Brandon?"

"Oh, I'm all right. I shall be off to London to look for a job one of these days."

He looked up at her suddenly, sharply, as though he wanted to catch her interest. But she showed no emotion.

"Well, I expect this is slow for you, a little place like this. Plenty going on in London, I expect."

"Yes. Do you ever think you'd like to go there?"

"Daresay I shall one of these days. Never know your luck. But I'm not terrible anxious.... Well, I must be getting on."

He caught her eyes and held them.

"Come back for a moment when you're less busy. I've got something I want to say to you."

Very slightly the colour rose in her dark cheek.

"All right," she said.

When she had gone he drew a deep breath, as though he had surmounted some great and sudden danger. He felt that if she had refused to come he would have risen and broken everything in the place. Now, as though he had, by that little conversation with her, reassured himself about her, he looked around the room. His attention was at once attracted by a man who was sitting in the further corner, his back against the wall, opposite to him.

This was a man remarkable for his extreme thinness, for the wild lock of black hair that fell over his forehead and almost into his eyes, and for a certain sort of threadbare and dissolute distinction which hung about him. Falk knew him slightly. His name was Edmund Davray, and he had lived in Polchester now for a considerable number of years. He was an artist, and had arrived in the town one summer on a walking tour through Glebeshire. He had attracted attention at once by the quality of his painting, by the volubility of his manner, and by his general air of being a person of considerable distinction. His surname was French, but no one knew anything with any certainty about him. Something attracted him in Polchester, and he stayed. He soon gave it out that it was the Cathedral that fascinated him; he painted a number of remarkable sketches of the nave, the choir, Saint Margaret's Chapel, the Black Bishop's Tomb. He had a "show" in London and was supposed to have done very well out of it. He disappeared for a little, but soon returned, and was to be found in the Cathedral most days of the week.

At first he had a little studio at the top of Orange Street. At this time he was rather popular in Polchester society. Mrs. Combermere took him up and found him audacious and amusing. His French name gave a kind of piquancy to his audacity; he was unusual; he was striking. It was right for Polchester to have an artist and to stick him up in the very middle of the town as an emblem of taste and culture. Soon, however, he began to decline. It was whispered that he drank, that his morals were "only what you'd expect of an artist," and that he was really "too queer about the Cathedral." One day he told Miss Dobell that the amount that she knew about literature would go inside a very small pea, and he was certainly "the worse for liquor" at one of Mrs. Combermere's tea-parties. He did not, however, give them time to drop him; he dropped himself, gave up his Orange Street studio, lived, no one knew where, neglected his appearance, and drank quite freely whenever he could get anything to drink. He now cut everybody, rather than allowed himself to be cut.

He was in the Cathedral as often as ever, and Lawrence and Cobbett, the Vergers, longed to have an excuse for expelling him, but he always behaved himself there and was in nobody's way. He was finally regarded as "quite mad," and was seen to talk aloud to himself as he walked about the streets.

"An unhappy example," Miss Dobell said, "of the artistic temperament, that wonderful gift, gone wrong."

Falk had seen him often before at the "Dog and Pilchard," and had wondered at first whether Annie Hogg was the attraction. It was soon clear, however, that there was nothing in that. He never looked at the girl nor, indeed, at any one else in the place. He simply sat there moodily staring in front of him and drinking.

To-day it was clear that Falk had caught his attention. He looked across the room at him with a queer defiant glance, something like Falk's own. Once it seemed that he had made up his mind to come over and speak to him.

He half rose in his seat, then sank back again. But his eyes came round again and again to the corner where Falk was sitting.

The Cathedral chimes had whispered twice in the room before Annie returned.

"What is it you're wanting?" she asked.

"Come outside and speak to me."

"No, I can't do that. Father's watching."

"Well, will you meet me one evening and have a talk?"

"What about?"

"Several things."

"It isn't right, Mr. Brandon. What's a gentleman like you want with a girl like me?"

"I only want us to get away a little from all this noise and filth."

Suddenly she smiled.

"Well, I don't mind if I do. After supper's a good time. Father goes up the town to play billiards. After eight."

"When?"

"What about to-morrow evening?"

"All right. Where?"

"Up to the Mill. Five minutes up from here."

"I'll be there," he said.

"Don't let father catch 'ee--that's all," she smiled down at him. "You'm a fule, Mr. Brandon, to bother with such as I." He said nothing and she walked away. Very shortly after, Davray got up from his seat and came over to Falk's corner. It was obvious that he had been drinking rather heavily. He was a little unsteady on his feet.

"You're young Brandon, aren't you?" he asked.

In ordinary times Falk would have told him to go to the devil, and there would have been a row, but to-day he was caught away so absolutely into his own world that any one could speak to him, any one laugh at him, any one insult him, and he would not care. He had been meditating for weeks the advance that he had just taken; always when one meditates for long over a risk it swells into gigantic proportions. So this had been; that simple sentence asking her to come out and talk to him had seemed an impossible challenge to every kind of fate, and now, in a moment, the gulf had been jumped...so easy, so strangely easy....

From a great distance Davray's words came to him, and in the dialogue that followed he spoke like a somnambulist.

"Yes," he said, "my name's Brandon."

"I knew, of course," said Davray. "I've seen you about." He spoke with great swiftness, the words tumbling over one another, not with eagerness, but rather with a kind of supercilious carelessness. "Beastly hole, isn't this? Wonder why one comes here. Must do something in this rotten town. I've drunk enough of this filthy beer. What do you say to moving out?"

Falk looked up at him.

"What do you say?" he asked.

"Let's move out of this. If you're walking up the town I'll go with you."

Falk was not conscious of the man, but it was quite true that he wanted to get out of the place now that his job in it was done. He got up without a word and began to push through the room. He was met near the door by Hogg.

"Goin', Mr. Brandon? Like to settle now or leave it to another day?"

"What's that?" said Falk, stopping as though some one had touched him on the shoulder. He seemed to see the large smiling man suddenly in front of him outlined against a shifting wall of mist.

"Payin' now or leavin' it? Please yourself, Mr. Brandon."

"Oh--paying!" He fumbled in his pocket, produced half-a-crown, gave it to Hogg without looking at him and went out. Davray followed, slouching through the room and passage with the conceited over-careful walk of a man a little tipsy.

Outside, as they went down the street still obscured with the wet mist, Davray poured out a flow of words to which he seemed to want no answer.

"I hope you didn't mind my speaking to you like that--a bit unceremonious. But to tell you the truth I'm lonely sometimes. Also, if you want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I'm a bit tipsy too. Generally am. This air makes one feel queer after that stinking hole, doesn't it? If you can call this air. I've seen you there a lot lately and often thought I'd like to talk to you. You're the only decent- looking fellow in the whole of this town, if you'll forgive my saying so. Isn't it a bloody hole? But of course you think so too. I can see it in your face. I suppose you go to that pub after that girl. I saw you talking to her. Well, each man to his taste. I'd never interfere with any man's pleasure. I loathe women myself, always have. They never appealed to me a little bit. In Paris the men used to wonder what I was after. I was after Ambition in those days. Funny thing, but I thought I was going to be a great painter once. Queer what one can trick oneself into believing--so I might have been if I hadn't come to this beastly town. Hope I'm not boring you...."

He stopped as though he had suddenly realised that his companion had not said a word. They were pushing now up the hill into the market-place and the mist was now so thick that they could scarcely see one another's face. Falk was thinking. "To-morrow evening.... What do I want? What's going to happen? What do I want?"

The silence made him conscious of his companion.

"What do you say?" he asked.

"Hope I'm not boring you."

"No, that's all right. Where are we?"

"Just coming into the market."

"Oh, yes."

"If I talk a lot it's because I haven't had any one to talk to for weeks. Not that I want to talk to any one. I despise the lot of them. Conceited set of ignorant parrots.... Whole place run by women and what can you expect? You're not staying here, I suppose. I heard you'd had enough of Oxford and I don't wonder. No place for a man, beautiful enough but spoilt by the people. Damn people--always coming along and spoiling places. Now there's the Cathedral, most wonderful thing in England, but does any one know it? Not a bit of it. You'd think they fancied that the Cathedral owes them something--about as much sense of beauty as a cockroach."

They were pressing up the High Street now. There was no one about. It was a town of ghosts. By the Arden Gate Falk realised where he was and halted.

"Hullo! we're nearly home.... Well...good afternoon, Mr. Davray."

"Come into the Cathedral for a moment," Davray seemed to be urgent about this. "Have you ever been up into the King Harry Tower? I bet you haven't."

"King Harry Tower?..." Falk stared at the man. What did the fellow want him to do? Go into the Cathedral? Well, why not? Stupid to go home just now--nothing to do there but think, and people would interrupt.... Think better out of doors. But what was there to think about? He was not thinking, simply going round and round.... Who was this fellow anyway?

"As you like," he said.

They crossed the Precincts and went through the West door into the Cathedral. The nave was full of dusky light and very still. Candles glimmered behind the great choir-screen and there were lamps by the West door. Seen thus, in its half-dark, the nave bore full witness to the fact that Polchester has the largest Cathedral in Northern Europe. It is certainly true that no other building in England gives the same overwhelming sense of length.

In full daylight the nave perhaps, as is the case with all English Cathedrals, lacks colour and seems cold and deserted. In the dark of this spring evening it was full of mystery, and the great columns of the nave's ten bays, rising unbroken to the roof groining, sprang, it seemed, out of air, superbly, intolerably inhuman.

The colours from the tombs and the brasses glimmered against the grey, and the great rose-coloured circle of the West window flung pale lights across the cold dark of the flags and pillars.

The two men were held by the mysterious majesty of the place. Falk was lifted right out of his own preoccupied thoughts.

He had never considered the Cathedral except as a place to which he was dragged for services against his will, but to-night, perhaps because of his own crisis, he seemed to see it all for the first time. He was conscious now of Davray and was aware that he did not like him and wished to be rid of him--"an awful-looking tout" he thought him, "with his greasy long hair and his white long face and his spindle legs."

"Now we'll go up into King Harry," Davray said. But at that moment old Lawrence came bustling along. Lawrence, over seventy years of age, had grown stout and white-haired in the Cathedral's service. He was a fine figure in his purple gown, broad-shouldered, his chest and stomach of a grand protuberance, his broad white flowing beard a true emblem of his ancient dignity. He was the most autocratic of Vergers and had been allowed now for many years to do as he pleased. The only thorn in his flesh was Cobbett, the junior Verger, who, as he very well realised, was longing for him to die, that he might step into his shoes. "I do believe," he was accustomed to say to Mrs. Lawrence, a little be-bullied woman, "that that man will poison me one of these fine days."

His autocracy had grown on him with the size and the whiteness of his beard, and there were many complaints--rude to strangers, sycophantic to the aristocracy, greedy of tips, insolent and conceited, he was an excellent example of the proper spirit of the Church Militant. He had, however, his merits. He loved small children and would have allowed them to run riot on the Cathedral greens had he not been checked, and he had a pride in the Cathedral that would drive him to any sacrifice in his defence of it.

It was natural enough that he should hate the very sight of Davray, and when that gentleman appeared he hung about in the background hoping that he might catch him in some crime. At first he thought him alone.

"Oh, Verger," Davray said, as though he were speaking to a beggar who had asked of him alms. "I want to go up into King Harry. You have the key, I think."

"Well, you can't, sir," said Lawrence, with considerable satisfaction. "'Tis after hours." Then he saw Falk.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Brandon, sir. I didn't realise. Do you want to go up the Tower, sir?" "We may as well," said Falk.

"Of course for you, sir, it's different. Strangers have to keep certain hours. This way, sir."

They followed the pompous old man across the nave, up the side aisle, past "tombs and monuments and gilded knights," until they came to the King Harry Chapel. This was to the right of the choir, and before the screen that railed it off from the rest of the church there was a notice saying that this Chapel had been put aside for private prayer and it was hoped that no one would talk or make any noise, were some one meditating or praying there. The little place was infinitely quiet, with a special air of peace and beauty as though all the prayers and meditations that had been offered there had deeply sanctified it; Lawrence pushed open the door of the screen and they crossed the flagged floor. Suddenly into the heart of the hush there broke the Cathedral chimes, almost, as it seemed, directly above their heads, booming, echoing, dying with lingering music back into the silence. At the corner of the Chapel there was a little wooden door; Lawrence unlocked it and pushed it open. "Mind how you go, sir," he said, speaking to Falk as though Davray did not exist. "'Tis a bit difficult with the winding stair."

The two men went forward into the black darkness, leaving the dusky light behind them. Davray led the way and Falk followed, feeling with his arms the black walls on either side of him, knocking with his legs against the steps above him. Here there was utter darkness and no sound. He had suddenly a half-alarmed, half-humorous suspicion that Davray was suddenly going to turn round upon him and push him down the stair or stick a knife into him--the fear of the dark. "After all, what am I doing with this fellow?" he thought. "I don't know him. I don't like him. I don't want to be with him."

"That's better," he heard Davray say. There was a glimmer, then a shadow of grey light, finally they had stepped out into what was known as the Whispering Gallery, a narrow railed platform that ran the length of the Chapel and beyond to the opposite Tower. They did not stop there. They pushed up again by more winding stairs, black for a space, then lit by a window, then black again. At last, after what had seemed a long journey, they were in a little, spare, empty room with a wooden floor. One side of this little room was open and railed in. Looking down, the floor of the nave seemed a vast distance below. You seemed here to be flying in glory. The dim haze of the candles just touched the misty depth with golden colour. Above them the great roof seemed close and menacing. Everywhere pillars and buttresses rose out of space. The great architect of the building seemed here to have his true kingdom, so vast was the depth and the height and the grandeur. The walls and the roof and the pillars that supported it were alive with their own greatness, scornful of little men and their little loves. The hush was filled with movement and stir and a vast business....

The two men leaned on the rails and looked down. Far below, the white figured altar, the brass of the Black Bishop's tomb, the glitter of Saint Margaret's screen struck in little points of dull gold like stars upon a grey inverted sky.

Davray turned suddenly upon his companion. "And it's men like your father," he said, "who think that this place is theirs.... Theirs! Presumption! But they'll get it in the neck for that. This place can bide its time. Just when you think you're its master it turns and stamps you out."

Falk said nothing. Davray seemed irritated by his silence. "You wait and see," he said. "It amuses me to see your governor walking up the choir on Sundays as though he owned the place. Owned it! Why, he doesn't realise a stone of it! Well, he'll get it. They all have who've tried his game. Owned it!"

"Look here," said Falk, "don't you say anything about my father--that's none of your business. He's all right. I don't know what the devil I came up here for--thinking of other things."

Davray too was thinking of other things.

"You wonderful place!" he whispered. "You beautiful place! You've ruined me, but I don't care. You can do what you like with me. You wonder! You wonder!"

Falk looked at him. The man was mad. He was holding on to the railing, leaning forward, staring....

"Look here, it isn't safe to lean like that. You'll be tumbling over and breaking your neck if you're not careful."

But Davray did not hear him. He was lost in his own dreams. Falk despised dreams although just now he was himself in the grip of one. Besides the fellow was drunk.

A sudden disgust of his companion overtook him.

"Well, so long," he said. "I must be getting home!"

He wondered for a moment whether it were safe to leave the fellow there. "It's his own look-out," he thought, and as Davray said no more he left him.

Back once more in the King Harry Chapel, he looked up. But he could see no one and could hear no sound.