ten bays, rising unbroken to the roof groining, sprang, it seemed, out of
air, superbly, intolerably inhuman.

The colours from the tombs and the brasses glimmered against the grey, and
the great rose-coloured circle of the West window flung pale lights across
the cold dark of the flags and pillars.

The two men were held by the mysterious majesty of the place. Falk was
lifted right out of his own preoccupied thoughts.

He had never considered the Cathedral except as a place to which he was
dragged for services against his will, but to-night, perhaps because of
his own crisis, he seemed to see it all for the first time. He was
conscious now of Davray and was aware that he did not like him and wished
to be rid of him--"an awful-looking tout" he thought him, "with his greasy
long hair and his white long face and his spindle legs."

"Now we'll go up into King Harry," Davray said. But at that moment old
Lawrence came bustling along. Lawrence, over seventy years of age, had
grown stout and white-haired in the Cathedral's service. He was a fine
figure in his purple gown, broad-shouldered, his chest and stomach of a
grand protuberance, his broad white flowing beard a true emblem of his
ancient dignity. He was the most autocratic of Vergers and had been
allowed now for many years to do as he pleased. The only thorn in his
flesh was Cobbett, the junior Verger, who, as he very well realised, was
longing for him to die, that he might step into his shoes. "I do believe,"
he was accustomed to say to Mrs. Lawrence, a little be-bullied woman,
"that that man will poison me one of these fine days."

His autocracy had grown on him with the size and the whiteness of his