name and honour of art for their own advancement--the instant effect was
overwhelmingly impressive. All that had been honest and sincere in the
heart of England for a thousand years leapt mystically up and made it
impossible that the effect should be other than overwhelmingly
impressive. It was an effect beyond argument and reason; it was the
magic flowering of centuries in a single moment, the silent awful sigh
of a nation's saecular soul. It took majesty and loveliness from the
walls around it, and rendered them again tenfold. It left nothing
common, neither the motives nor the littleness of men. In Priam's mind
it gave dignity to Lady Sophia Entwistle, and profound tragedy to the
death of Leek; it transformed even the gestures of the choir-leader into
grave commands.

And all that was for him! He had brushed pigments on to cloth in a way
of his own, nothing more, and the nation to which he had always denied
artistic perceptions, the nation which he had always fiercely accused of
sentimentality, was thus solemnizing his committal to the earth! Divine
mystery of art! The large magnificence of England smote him! He had not
suspected his own greatness, nor England's.

The music ceased. He chanced to look up at the little glooming window,
perched out of reach of mankind. And the thought that the window had
burned there, patiently and unexpectantly, for hundreds of years, like
an anchorite above the river and town, somehow disturbed him so that he
could not continue to look at it. Ineffable sadness of a mere window!
And his eye fell--fell on the coffin of Henry Leek with its white cross,
and the representative of England's majesty standing beside it. And
there was the end of Priam Farll's self-control. A pang like a pang of
parturition itself seized him, and an issuing sob nearly ripped him in
two. It was a loud sob, undisguised, unashamed, reverberating. Other