e lower lip drawn up under
the black teeth with an effort, till it appeared to snarl, and the ropes
of pearls leaping wildly on her lean purple stomacher. And over all the
grave oak walls and the bright sconces and the taper flames blown about
by the eddying gusts from the whirlpool beneath.

As Anthony went down the square winding staircase, an hour later when the
evening was over, and the keen winter air poured up to meet him, his
brain was throbbing with the madness of dance and music and whirling
colour. Here, it seemed to him, lay the secret of life. For a few minutes
his old day-dreams came back but in more intoxicating dress. The figure
of Mary Corbet in her rose-coloured silk and her clouds of black hair,
and her jewels and her laughing eyes and scarlet mouth, and her violet
fragrance and her fire--this dominated the boy. As he walked towards the
stables across the starlit court, she seemed to move before him, to hold
out her hands to him, to call him her own dear lad; to invite him out of
the drab-coloured life that lay on all sides, behind and before, up into
a mystic region of jewelled romance, where she and he would live and be
one in the endless music of rippling strings and shrill flutes and the
maddening tap of a little hidden drum.

But the familiar touch of his own sober suit and the creaking saddle as
he rode home to Lambeth, and the icy wind that sang in the river sedges,
and the wholesome smell of the horse and the touch of the coarse hair at
the shoulder, talked and breathed the old Puritan common sense back to
him again. That warm-painted, melodious world he had left was gaudy
nonsense; and dancing was not the same as living; and Mary Corbet was not
just a rainbow on the foam that would die when the sun went in; but both
she and he together were human souls, redeemed by the death of the
Saviour, with His work to do and no time or energy for folly; and James
Maxwell in the Tower--(thank God, however, not for long!)--James Maxwell
with his wrenched joints and forehead and lips wet with agony, was in the
right; and that lean bitter furious woman in the purple and pearls, who
supped to the blare of trumpets, and danced to the ripple of lutes,
wholly and utterly and eternally in the wrong.

CHAPTER XI

A STATION OF THE CROSS

Philosophers tell us that the value of existence lies not in the objects
perceived, but in the powers of perceptio