The sweet chapel bell was just ceasing to toll as Mr. Jos. Larkin stalked
under the antique ribbed arches of the little aisle. Slim and tall, he
glided, a chastened dignity in his long upturned countenance, and a faint
halo of saint-hood round his tall bald head. Having whispered his orisons
into his well-brushed hat and taken his seat, his dove-like eyes rested
for a moment upon the Brandon seat.

There was but one figure in it--slender, light-haired, with his yellow
moustache and pale face, grown of late a little fatter. Captain Brandon
Lake was a very punctual church-goer since the idea of trying the county
at the next election had entered his mind. Dorcas was not very well. Lord
Chelford had taken his departure, and your humble servant, who pens these
pages, had gone for a few days to Malwich. There was no guest just then
at Brandon, and the captain sat alone on that devotional dais, the
elevated floor of the great oaken Brandon seat.

There were old Brandon and Wylder monuments built up against the walls.
Figures cut in stone, and painted and gilded in tarnished splendour,
according to the gorgeous barbarism of Elizabeth's and the first James's
age; tablets in brass, marble-pillared monuments, and a couple of
life-sized knights, armed _cap-a-pie_, on their backs in the aisle.

There is a stained window in the east which connoisseurs in that branch
of mediaeval art admire. There is another very fine one over the Brandon
pew--a freak, perhaps, of some of those old Brandons or Wylders, who had
a strange spirit of cynicism mingling in their profligacy and violence.

Reader, you have looked on Hans Holbein's 'Dance of Death,' that grim,
phantasmal pageant, symbolic as a dream of Pharaoh; and perhaps you bear