cting themselves more and more
towards the exits, as the night was coming on and the church would be
closed presently; in one aisle a man was talking aloud, as if lecturing,
with a crowd of heads about him. In another a number of soberly dressed
men were putting up their papers and ink on the little tables that stood
in a row--this was Scriveners' Corner, she was told; from a third half a
dozen persons were dejectedly moving away--these were servants that had
waited to be hired. But the soul of the place was gone. When they came
out into the transepts, Anthony stopped them with a gesture, while a
couple of porters, carrying boxes on their heads, pushed by, on their
short cut through the cathedral.

"It was there," he said, "that the altars stood."

He pointed between the pillars on either side, and there, up little
raised steps, lay the floors of the chapels. But within all was empty,
except for a tomb or two, some tattered colours and the _piscinae_ still
in place. Where the altars had stood there were blank spaces of wall;
piled up in one such place were rows of wooden seats set there for want
of room.

Opposite the entrance to the choir, where once overhead had hung the
great Rood, the four stood and looked in, through a gap which the masons
were mending in the high wall that had bricked off the chancel from the
nave. On either side, as of old, still rose up the towering carven
stalls; the splendid pavement still shone beneath, refracting back from
its surface the glimmer of light from the stained windows above; but the
head of the body was gone. Somewhere, beneath the deep shadowed altar
screen, they could make out an erection that might have been an altar,
only they knew that it was not. It was no longer the Stone of
Sacrifice, whence the smoke of the mystical Calvary ascended day by
day: it was the table, and no more, where bread and wine were eaten and
drunk in memory of an event whose deathless energy had ceased, in this
place, at least, to operate. Yet it was here, thought Marjorie, that
only forty years ago, scarcely more than twenty years before she was
born, on this very Night, the great church had hummed and vibrated with
life. Round all the walls had sat priests, each in his place; and beside
each kneeled a penitent, making ready for the joy of Bethlehem once
again--wise and simple--Shepherds and Magi--yet all simple before the
baffling and entrancing Mystery. There had been footsteps and voices
there t