stone, a
dim-coloured light through which something took place obscurely,
passing into darkness: a high, delighted framework of the mystic
screen, and beyond, in the furthest beyond, the altar. It was a
very real experience. She was carried away. And the land seemed
to be covered with a vast, mystic church, reserved in gloom,
thrilled with an unknown Presence.

Almost it hurt her, to look out of the window and see the
lilacs towering in the vivid sunshine. Or was this the jewelled
glass?

He talked of Gothic and Renaissance and Perpendicular, and
Early English and Norman. The words thrilled her.

"Have you been to Southwell?" he said. "I was there at twelve
o'clock at midday, eating my lunch in the churchyard. And the
bells played a hymn.

"Ay, it's a fine Minster, Southwell, heavy. It's got heavy,
round arches, rather low, on thick pillars. It's grand, the way
those arches travel forward.

"There's a sedilia as well--pretty. But I like the main
body of the church--and that north porch--"

He was very much excited and filled with himself that
afternoon. A flame kindled round him, making his experience
passionate and glowing, burningly real.

His uncle listened with twinkling eyes, half-moved. His aunt
bent forward her dark face, half-moved, but held by other
knowledge. Anna went with him.

He returned to his lodging at night treading quick, his eyes
glittering, and his face shining darkly as if he came from some
passionate, vital tryst.

The glow remained in him, the fire burned, his heart was
fierce like a sun. He enjoyed his unknown life and his own self.
And he was ready to go back to the Marsh.

Without knowing it, Anna was wanting him to come. In him she
had escaped. In him the bounds of her experience were
transgressed: he was the hole in the wall, beyond which the
sunshine blazed on an outside world.

He came. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, talking again,
there recurred the strange, remote reality which carried
everything before it. Sometimes, he talked of his father, whom
he hated with a hatred that was burningly close to love, of his
mother, whom he loved, with a love that was keenly close to
hatred, or to revolt. His sentences were clumsy, he was only
half articulate. But he had the wonderful voice, that could ring
its vibration through the girl's soul, transport her into his
feeling. Sometimes his voice was hot and declamatory, sometimes
it had a strange, twanging, almost cat-like so