rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern
aisle--a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who
seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his
dreams. In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd--an ill-tempered
Flemish peasant--while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town
climbed the whole height of the background. It was probably the artist's
native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered
his own household Lares. But the hill on which the town stood, and the
mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not
of Belgium, but of a dream country--of Italy, perhaps, the medieval
artist's paradise.

'Happy man!' said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; 'look, he put it
together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of. And there
it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no
getting. For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we
know and what we dream.'

Miss Bretherton looked at him curiously. It was as though for the first
time she connected the man himself with his reputation and his pictures,
that the great artist in him was more than a name to her. She listened to
him sympathetically, and looked at the window closely, as though trying
to follow all he had been saying. But it struck Mrs. Stuart that there
was often a bewilderment in her manner which had been strange to it on
her first entrance into London. Those strong emphatic ways Kendal had
first noticed in her were less frequent. Sometimes she struck Mrs. Stuart
as having the air of a half-blindfold person trying to find her way along
strange roads.

They passed out into the cool and darkness of the cloisters, and through