reinforced by trumpets. And then, as sudden and profound as the hush of
death, there fell an enormous silence.

II

As the five-minutes bell began, sounding like a continuous wind-note in
the great vaults overhead, solemn and persistent, Mabel drew a long
breath and leaned back in her seat from the rigid position in which for
the last half-hour she had been staring out at the wonderful sight. She
seemed to herself to have assimilated it at last, to be herself once
more, to have drunk her fill of the triumph and the beauty. She was as
one who looks upon a summer sea on the morning after a storm. And now
the climax was at hand.

From end to end and side to side the interior of the Abbey presented a
great broken mosaic of human faces; living slopes, walls, sections and
curves. The south transept directly opposite to her, from pavement to
rose window, was one sheet of heads; the floor was paved with them, cut
in two by the scarlet of the gangway leading from the chapel of St.
Faith--on the right, the choir beyond the open space before the
sanctuary was a mass of white figures, scarved and surpliced; the high
organ gallery, beneath which the screen had been removed, was crowded
with them, and, far down beneath, the dim nave stretched the same
endless pale living pavement to the shadow beneath the west window.
Between every group of columns behind the choir-stalls, before her, to
right, left, and behind, were platforms contrived in the masonry; and
the exquisite roof, fan-tracery and soaring capital, alone gave the eye
an escape from humanity. The whole vast space was full, it seemed, of
delicate sunlight that streamed in from the artificial light set outside
each window, and poured the ruby and the purple and the blue from the
old glass in long shafts of colour across the dusty air, and in broken
patches on the faces and dresses behind. The murmur of ten thousand
voices filled the place, supplying, it seemed, a solemn accompaniment to
that melodious note that now pulsed above it. And finally, more
significant than all, was the empty carpeted sanctuary at her feet, the
enormous altar with its flight of steps, the gorgeous curtain and the
great untenanted sedilia.

* * * * *

Mabel needed some such reassurance, for last night, until the coming of
Oliver, had passed for her as a kind of appalling waking dream. From the
first shock of what she had seen outside the church, through those hours
of waiting, with the kn