the yawning breach. And then, realizing that among such his lot
was thrown--realizing also the dead hand that rested on his
teaching and preaching--his heart went down into a sea of
hopelessness, and he felt the chill of despair.

The gong of the chapel clock announced the hour of nine, in thin,
metallic beats, and looking up, he noted the swealing tapers in
the candelabra over his head. In his over-wrought, nervous
condition, he imagined he saw in one of the flickering, far-spent
lights the waning life of Amanda Stott, and the horrible thought
of eternal extinction at death laid its cold hand on the larger
hope which he was struggling to keep aflame in his darkening soul.
Turning his glances towards the pulpit that rose gaunt and square
above the deacons' pew, and over which hung the old sounding-board,
as though to mock the voices, now for ever silent, that from time
to time had been wont to reverberate from its panels, he began to
wonder whether the message the Church called revelation was not,
after all, as vain as 'laughter over wine'; and as he looked on
the frowning galleries and the distant corners of the chapel,
gloomy and fearsome--the high-backed pews, peopled with shadows
thrown from the waning lights--he felt the force of the words of
one of his masters: 'What shadows we are, and what shadows we
pursue.'

Suddenly he was recalled to his position as the pastor of the
church by the voice of old Enoch, mellow as the tones of the flute
on which he so often tuned his soul in moods of sorrow and sin.
How long Enoch had been talking Mr. Penrose knew not; but what he
heard in the rude yet kindly vernacular of the moors was: