FRANCIS THOMPSON.




CHAPTER I


London lay as if washed with water-colour that Sunday morning, light blue
sky and pale dancing sunlight wooing the begrimed stones of Westminster
like a young girl with an old lover. The empty streets, clean-swept, were
bathed in the light, and appeared to be transformed from the streets of
week-day life. Yet the half of Londoners lay late abed, perhaps because
six mornings a week of reality made them care little for one of magic.

Peter, nevertheless, saw little of this beauty. He walked swiftly as
always, and he looked about him, but he noticed none of these things.
True, a fluttering sheet of newspaper headlines impaled on the railings
of St. Margaret's held him for a second, but that was because its message
was the one that rang continually in his head, and had nothing at all to
do with the beauty of things that he passed by.

He was a perfectly dressed young man, in a frock coat and silk hat of the
London clergyman, and he was on his way to preach at St. John's at the
morning service. Walking always helped him to prepare his sermons, and
this sermon would ordinarily have struck him as one well worth preparing.
The pulpit of St. John's marked a rung up in the ladder for him. That
great fashionable church of mid-Victorian faith and manners held a
congregation on Sunday mornings for which the Rector catered with care.
It said a good deal for Peter that he had been invited to preach. He