y lives here, if she has fled
from all the world besides. No, no; say what you like, it cannot be too
strong for me.'

Mrs. Stuart, meanwhile, kept her head cool, admired all that she was
expected to admire, and did it well, and never forgot that the carriage
was waiting for them, and that Miss Bretherton was not to be tired. It
was she who took charge of the other two, piloted them safely into the
fly, carried them down the High Street, sternly refused to make a stop at
Magdalen, and finally landed them in triumph to the minute at the great
gate of Christchurch. Then they strolled into the quiet cathedral,
delighted themselves with its irregular bizarre beauty, its unexpected
turns and corners, which gave it a capricious fanciful air for all the
solidity and business-like strength of its Norman framework, and as they
rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern
aisle--a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who
seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his
dreams. In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd--an ill-tempered
Flemish peasant--while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town
climbed the whole height of the background. It was probably the artist's
native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered
his own household Lares. But the hill on which the town stood, and the
mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not
of Belgium, but of a dream country--of Italy, perhaps, the medieval
artist's paradise.

'Happy man!' said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; 'look, he put it
together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of. And there
it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no
getting. For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we
know and what we dream.'

Miss Bretherton looked at him curiously. It was as though for the first
time she connected the man himself with his reputation and his pictures,
that the great artist in him was more than a name to her. She listened to
him sympathetically, and looked at the window closely, as though trying
to follow all he had been saying. But it struck Mrs. Stuart that there
was often a bewilderment in her manner which had been strange to it on
her first entrance into London. Those strong emphatic ways Kendal had
first noticed in her were less frequent. Sometimes she struck Mrs. Stuart
as having