ucked him by his hanging sleeve.

"The hurdles came along here," he said; and Chris looked at him vacantly
as if he did not understand.

Then they were under Tyburn-gate, and the clump of elms stood before
them.

* * * * *

It was a wide open space, dusty now and trampled.

What grass there had been in patches by the two little streams that
flowed together here, was crushed and flat under foot. The elms cast
long shadows from the west, and birds were chirping in the branches;
there was a group or two of people here and there looking curiously
about them. A man's voice came across the open space, explaining; and
his arm rose and wheeled and pointed and paused--three or four children
hung together, frightened and interested.

But Chris saw little of all this. He had no eyes for the passing
details; they were fixed on the low mound that rose fifty yards away,
and the three tall posts, placed in a triangle and united by
cross-beams, that stood on it, gaunt against the sky.

As he came nearer to it, walking as one in a dream across the dusty
ground and trampled grass, and paying no heed to the priest behind him
who whispered with an angry nervousness, he was aware of the ends of
three or four ropes that hung motionless from the beams in the still
evening air; and with his eyes fixed on these in exaltation and terror
he stumbled up the sloping ground and came beneath them.

There was a great peace round him as he stood there, stroking one of
the uprights with a kind of mechanical tenderness; the men were silent
as they saw the two monks there, and watched to see what they would do.

The towers of Tyburn-gate rose a hundred yards away, empty now, but
crowded this morning; and behind them the long road with the fields and
great mansions on this side and that, leading down to the city in front
and Westminster on the right, those two dens of the tiger that had
snarled so fiercely a few hours before, as she licked her lips red with
martyrs' blood. It was indescribably peaceful now; there was no sound
but the birds overhead, and the soft breeze in the young leaves, and the
trickle of the streams defiled to-day, but running clean and guiltless
now; and the level sunlight lay across the wide flat ground and threw
the shadow of the mound and gallows nearly to the foot of the gate.

But to Chris the place was alive with phantoms; the empty space had
vanished, and a sea of faces seemed turned up