for so many years, and doubtless attached a significance of their
own to the odd words they had repeated to him. The nameless lady
was the clandestine connexion--a fact nothing could have made
clearer than his indecent haste to rejoin her. He sank on his
knees before his altar while his head fell over on his hands. His
weakness, his life's weariness overtook him. It seemed to him he
had come for the great surrender. At first he asked himself how he
should get away; then, with the failing belief in the power, the
very desire to move gradually left him. He had come, as he always
came, to lose himself; the fields of light were still there to
stray in; only this time, in straying, he would never come back.
He had given himself to his Dead, and it was good: this time his
Dead would keep him. He couldn't rise from his knees; he believed
he should never rise again; all he could do was to lift his face
and fix his eyes on his lights. They looked unusually, strangely
splendid, but the one that always drew him most had an
unprecedented lustre. It was the central voice of the choir, the
glowing heart of the brightness, and on this occasion it seemed to
expand, to spread great wings of flame. The whole altar flared--
dazzling and blinding; but the source of the vast radiance burned
clearer than the rest, gathering itself into form, and the form was
human beauty and human charity, was the far-off face of Mary
Antrim. She smiled at him from the glory of heaven--she brought
the glory down with her to take him. He bowed his head in
submission and at the same moment another wave rolled over him.
Was it the quickening of joy to pain? In the midst of his joy at
any rate he felt his buried face grow hot as with some communicated
knowledge that had the force of a reproach. It suddenly made him
contrast that very rapture with the bliss he had refused to
another. This breath of the passion immortal was all that other