expression with which Cecilia
assisted, directed, returned afterwards to her house, he felt that he
too had had to-day his funeral of a little child. But it had always
been his policy, through all his pursuit [189] of "experience," to take
flight in time from any too disturbing passion, from any sort of
affection likely to quicken his pulses beyond the point at which the
quiet work of life was practicable. Had he, after all, been taken
unawares, so that it was no longer possible for him to fly? At least,
during the journey he took, by way of testing the existence of any
chain about him, he found a certain disappointment at his heart,
greater than he could have anticipated; and as he passed over the crisp
leaves, nipped off in multitudes by the first sudden cold of winter, he
felt that the mental atmosphere within himself was perceptibly colder.

Yet it was, finally, a quite successful resignation which he achieved,
on a review, after his manner, during that absence, of loss or gain.
The image of Cecilia, it would seem, was already become for him like
some matter of poetry, or of another man's story, or a picture on the
wall. And on his return to Rome there had been a rumour in that
singular company, of things which spoke certainly not of any merely
tranquil loving: hinted rather that he had come across a world, the
lightest contact with which might make appropriate to himself also the
precept that "They which have wives be as they that have none."

This was brought home to him, when, in early spring, he ventured once
more to listen to the sweet singing of the Eucharist. It breathed
[190] more than ever the spirit of a wonderful hope--of hopes more
daring than poor, labouring humanity had ever seriously entertained
before, though it was plain that a great calamity was befallen. Amid
stifled sobbing, even as the pathetic words of the psalter relieved the
tension of their hearts, the people around him still wore upon their
faces their habitual gleam of joy, of placid satisfaction. They were
still under the influence of an immense gratitude in thinking, even
amid their present distress, of the hour of a great deliverance. As he
followed again that mystical dialogue, he felt also again, like a
mighty spirit about him, the potency, the half-realised presence, of a
great multitude, as if thronging along those awful passages, to hear
the sentence of its release from prison; a company which represented
nothing less than--