kly:

"Don't go on, my lord! For God's sake, don't go on; the tower's coming
down."

Then the spell that bound all the others fell on Lord Blandamer too.
His eyes were drawn by an awful attraction to the great tower that
watched over the market-place. The buttresses with their broad
set-offs, the double belfry windows with their pierced screens and
stately Perpendicular tracery, the open battlemented parapet, and
clustered groups of soaring pinnacles, shone pink and mellow in the
evening sun. They were as fair and wonderful as on that day when Abbot
Vinnicomb first looked upon his finished work, and praised God that it
was good.

But on this still autumn evening there was something terribly amiss with
the tower, in spite of all brave appearances. The jackdaws knew it, and
whirled in a mad chattering cloud round their old home, with wings
flashing and changing in the low sunlight. And on the west side, the
side nearest the market-place, there oozed out from a hundred joints a
thin white dust that fell down into the churchyard like the spray of
some lofty Swiss cascade. It was the very death-sweat of a giant in his
agony, the mortar that was being ground out in powder from the courses
of collapsing masonry. To Lord Blandamer it seemed like the sand
running through an hour-glass.

Then the crowd gave a groan like a single man. One of the gargoyles at
the corner, under the parapet, a demon figure that had jutted grinning
over the churchyard for three centuries, broke loose and fell crashing
on to the gravestones below. There was silence for a minute, and then
the murmurings of the onlookers began again. Everyone spoke in short,
breathless sentences, as though they feared the final crash might come
before they could finish. Churchwarden Joliffe, with pauses of
expectation, muttered about a "judgment in our midst." The Rector, in
Joliffe's pauses, seemed trying to confute him by some reference to
"those thirteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them." An
old charwoman whom Miss Joliffe sometimes employed wrung her hands with
an "Ah! poor dear--poor dear!" The Catholic priest was reciting
something in a low tone, and crossing himself at intervals. Lord
Blandamer, who stood near, caught a word or two of the commendatory
prayer for the dying, the "_Proficiscere_," and "_liliata rutilantium_,"
that showed how Abbot Vinnicomb's tower lived in the hearts of those
that abode under its shadow.

And al