"Every Sunday!" repeated Ambrose. "Why do not all--your master and
all these," pointing to the holiday crowds going to and fro--"why do
they not all come to listen?"

"Master doth come by times," said Tibble, in the tone of irony that
was hard to understand. "He owneth the dean as a rare preacher."

Ambrose did not try to understand. He exclaimed again, panting as
if his thoughts were too strong for his words--"Lo you, that
preacher--dean call ye him?--putteth a soul into what hath hitherto
been to me but a dead and empty framework."

Tibble held out his hand almost unconsciously, and Ambrose pressed
it. Man and boy, alike they had felt the electric current of that
truth, which, suppressed and ignored among man's inventions, was
coming as a new revelation to many, and was already beginning to
convulse the Church and the world.

Ambrose's mind was made up on one point. Whatever he did, and
wherever he went, he felt the doctrine he had just heard as needful
to him as vital air, and he must be within reach of it. This, and
not the hermit's cell, was what his instinct craved. He had always
been a studious, scholarly boy, supposed to be marked out for a
clerical life, because a book was more to him than a bow, and he had
been easily trained in good habits and practices of devotion; but
all in a childish manner, without going beyond simple receptiveness,
until the experiences of the last week had made a man of him, or
more truly, the Pardon chapel and Dean Colet's sermon had made him a
new being, with the realities of the inner life opened before him.