, conscious of the place and the scene, what a discord would have
arisen there! But everybody passed by Milton's grave except Ethelberta
and her friends, and for the moment the city's less invidious conduct
appeared to her more respectful as a practice than her own.

But she was brought out of this rumination by the halt at the church
door, and completely reminded of the present by finding the church open,
and Neigh--the, till yesterday, unimpassioned Neigh--waiting in the
vestibule to receive them, just as if he lived there. Ladywell had not
arrived. It was a long time before Ethelberta could get back to Milton
again, for Neigh was continuing to impend over her future more and more
visibly. The objects along the journey had distracted her mind from him;
but the moment now was as a direct renewal and prolongation of the
declaration-time yesterday, and as if in furtherance of the conclusion of
the episode.

They all alighted and went in, the coachman being told to take the
carriage to a quiet nook further on, and return in half-an-hour. Mrs.
Belmaine and her carriage some years before had accidentally got jammed
crosswise in Cheapside through the clumsiness of the man in turning up a
side street, blocking that great artery of the civilized world for the
space of a minute and a half, when they were pounced upon by half-a-dozen
policemen and forced to back ignominiously up a little slit between the
houses where they did not mean to go, amid the shouts of the hindered
drivers; and it was her nervous recollection of that event which caused
Mrs. Belmaine to be so precise in her directions now.

By the time that they were grouped around the tomb the visit had assumed
a much more solemn complexion than any one among them had anticipated.
Ashamed of the influence that she discovered Neigh to be exercising over
her, and opposing it steadily, Ethelberta drew from her pocket a small
edition of Milton, and proposed that she should read a few lines from
'Paradise Lost.' The responsibility of producing a successful afternoon
was upon her shoulders; she was, moreover, the only one present who could
properly manage blank verse, and this was sufficient to justify the
proposal.

She stood with her head against the marble slab just below the bust, and
began a selected piece, Neigh standing a few yards off on her right
looking into his hat in order to listen accurately, Mr. and Mrs. Belmaine
and Mrs. Doncastle seating themselves in