agony that sometimes overcomes me." This "agony," we learn, is the
pain of hearing Edwin speak lightly of his love, whom Jasper so
furiously desires. "Take it as a warning," Jasper says, but Edwin,
puzzled, and full of confiding tenderness, does not understand.

In the next scene we meet the school-girl, Rosa, who takes a walk
and has a tiff with Edwin. Sir Luke Fildes's illustration shows
Edwin as "a lad with the bloom of a lass," with a classic profile;
and a gracious head of long, thick, fair hair, long, though we
learn it has just been cut. He wears a soft slouched hat, and the
pea-coat of the period.


SAPSEA AND DURDLES


Next, Jasper and Sapsea, a pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit
at their wine, expecting a third guest. Mr. Sapsea reads his
absurd epitaph for his late wife, who is buried in a "Monument," a
vault of some sort in the Cathedral churchyard. To them enter
Durdles, a man never sober, yet trusted with the key of the crypt,
"as contractor for rough repairs." In the crypt "he habitually
sleeps off the fumes of liquor." Of course no Dean would entrust
keys to this incredibly dissipated, dirty, and insolent creature,
to whom Sapsea gives the key of his vault, for no reason at all, as
the epitaph, of course, is to be engraved on the outside, by
Durdles's men. However, Durdles insists on getting the key of the
vault: he has two other large keys. Jasper, trifling with them,
keeps clinking them together, so as to know, even in the dark, by
the sound, which is the key that opens Sapsea's vault, in the