lined the choir.

There was still silence--and longer silence, till Frank understood....

(IV)

His eyes grew accustomed to the gloom little by little, and he began to
be able to make out the magnificence of the place he was in. Behind him
stretched the immense nave, its roof and columns lost in darkness, its
sides faintly illuminated by the glimmer of single oil-lamps, each in a
small screened-off chapel. But in front of him was the greater splendor.

From side to side across the entrance to the choir ran the rood-screen,
a vast erection of brown oak and black iron, surmounted by a high loft,
from which glimmered down sheaves of silvered organ pipes, and, higher
yet, in deep shadow, he could make out three gigantic figures, of which
the center one was nailed to a cross. Beyond this began the stalls--dark
and majestic, broken by carving--jutting heads of kings and priests
leaning forward as if to breathe in the magnetism of that immense living
silence generated by forty men at their prayers. At the further end
there shone out faintly the glory of the High Altar, almost luminous, it
seemed, in the light of the single red spark that hung before it. Frank
could discern presently the gilded figures that stood among the
candlesticks behind, the throne and crucifix, the mysterious veiling
curtains of the Tabernacle.... Finally, in the midst of the choir,
stood a tall erection which he could not understand.

* * * * *

An extraordinary peace seemed to descend and envelop him as he looked--a
kind of crown and climax of various interior experiences that were
falling on him now--for the last few weeks. (It is useless trying to put
it into words. I shall hope to do my best presently by quoting Frank
himself.) There was a sense of home-coming; there was a sense of
astonishing sanity; there was a sense of an enormous objective peace,
meeting and ratifying that interior peace which was beginning to be his.
It appeared to him, somehow, as if for the first time he experienced
without him that which up to now he had chiefly found within. Certainly
there had been moments of this before--not merely emotional, you
understand--when heart and head lay still from their striving, and the
will reposed in Another Will. But this was the climax: it summed up all
that he had learned in the last few months; it soothed the last scars
away, it explained and answered--and, above all, correlated--his
experiences. N