head and
hands and feet. The world was gathered mocking and good-humoured
beneath. "_He saved others: Himself He cannot save.... Let Christ come
dozen from the Cross and we will believe._" Far away behind bushes and
in holes of the ground the friends of Jesus peeped and sobbed; Mary
herself was silent, pierced by seven swords; the disciple whom He loved
had no words of comfort.

He saw, too, how no word would be spoken from heaven; the angels
themselves were bidden to put sword into sheath, and wait on the eternal
patience of God, for the agony was hardly yet begun; there were a
thousand horrors yet before the end could come, that final sum of
crucifixion.... He must wait and watch, content to stand there and do
nothing; and the Resurrection must seem to him no more than a dreamed-of
hope. There was the Sabbath yet to come, while the Body Mystical must
lie in its sepulchre cut off from light, and even the dignity of the
Cross must be withdrawn and the knowledge that Jesus lived. That inner
world, to which by long effort he had learned the way, was all alight
with agony; it was bitter as brine, it was of that pale luminosity that
is the utmost product of pain, it hummed in his ears with a note that
rose to a scream ... it pressed upon him, penetrated him, stretched him
as on a rack.... And with that his will grew sick and nerveless.

"Lord! I cannot bear it!" he moaned....

In an instant he was back again, drawing long breaths of misery. He
passed his tongue over his lips, and opened his eyes on the darkening
apse before him. The organ was silent now, and the choir was gone, and
the lights out. The sunset colour, too, had faded from the walls, and
grim cold faces looked down on him from wall and vault. He was back
again on the surface of life; the vision had melted; he scarcely knew
what it was that he had seen.

But he must gather up the threads, and by sheer effort absorb them. He
must pay his duty, too, to the Lord that gave Himself to the senses as
well as to the inner spirit. So he rose, stiff and constrained, and
passed across to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament.

As he came out from the block of chairs, very upright and tall, with his
biretta once more on his white hair, he saw an old woman watching him
very closely. He hesitated an instant, wondering whether she were a
penitent, and as he hesitated she made a movement towards him.

"I beg your pardon, sir," she began.

She was not a Catholic then. He lif