d
stirs wheat. A moment later, and she was on her feet, gripping the rail,
with her heart like an over-driven engine beating pulses of blood,
furious and insistent, through every vein; for with great rushing surge
that sounded like a sigh, heard even above the triumphant tumult
overhead, the whole enormous assemblage had risen to its feet.

Confusion seemed to break out in the orderly procession. She saw Mr.
Francis run forward quickly, gesticulating like a conductor, and at his
signal the long line swayed forward, split, recoiled, and again slid
swiftly forward, breaking as it did so into twenty streams that poured
along the seats and filled them in a moment. Men ran and pushed, aprons
flapped, hands beckoned, all without coherent words. There was a
knocking of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, and then, as if a
god had lifted his hand for quiet, the music ceased abruptly, sending a
wild echo that swooned and died in a moment; a great sigh filled its
place, and, in the coloured sunshine that lay along the immense length
of the gangway that ran open now from west to east, far down in the
distant nave, a single figure was seen advancing.

III

What Mabel saw and heard and felt from eleven o'clock to half-an-hour
after noon on that first morning of the New Year she could never
adequately remember. For the time she lost the continuous consciousness
of self, the power of reflection, for she was still weak from her
struggle; there was no longer in her the process by which events are
stored, labelled and recorded; she was no more than a being who observed
as it were in one long act, across which considerations played at
uncertain intervals. Eyes and ear seemed her sole functions,
communicating direct with a burning heart.

* * * * *

She did not even know at what point her senses told her that this was
Felsenburgh. She seemed to have known it even before he entered, and she
watched Him as in complete silence He came deliberately up the red
carpet, superbly alone, rising a step or two at the entrance of the
choir, passing on and up before her. He was in his English judicial
dress of scarlet and black, but she scarcely noticed it. For her, too,
no one else existed but, He; this vast assemblage was gone, poised and
transfigured in one vibrating atmosphere of an immense human emotion.
There was no one, anywhere, but Julian Felsenburgh. Peace and light
burned like a glory about Him.

For an instant after passin