north side of the high altar in Saint Peter's. Her husband and her
eldest son had accompanied her, and having placed her in a position from
which they judged she could easily escape at the end of the ceremony,
they remained standing in the narrow, winding passage between improvised
barriers which led from the tribune to the door of the sacristy, and
which had been so arranged as to prevent confusion. Here they waited,
greeting their acquaintances when they could recognise them in the dim
twilight of the church, and watching the ever-increasing crowd that
surged slowly backward and forward outside the barrier. The old prince
was entitled by an hereditary office to a place in the great procession
of the day, and was not now with them.

Orsino felt as though the whole world were assembled about him within
the huge cathedral, as though its heart were beating audibly and its
muffled breathing rising and falling in his hearing. The unceasing sound
that went up from the compact mass of living beings was soft in quality,
but enormous in volume and sustained in tone, a great whispering which,
might have been heard a mile away. One hears in mammoth musical
festivals the extraordinary effect of four or five thousand voices
singing very softly; it is not to be compared to the unceasing whisper
of fifty thousand men.

The young fellow was conscious of a strange, irregular thrill of
enthusiasm which ran through him from time to time and startled his
imagination into life. It was only the instinct of a strong vitality
unconsciously longing to be the central point of the vitalities around
it. But he could not understand that. It seemed to him like a great
opportunity brought "within reach but slipping by untaken, not to return
again. He felt a strange, almost uncontrollable longing to spring upon
one of the tribunes, to raise his voice, to speak to the great