ed the knight of the Cross kneeling before the hidden
altar and laying his sword and his life at the feet of the Man of
Sorrows. He saw, as it is granted to poets to see, the plumed Cavalier
leading his lady to that same altar and saw the priest bless them in the
holy name. Almost he could read the inscriptions upon the tombs which
told of generations of country gentlemen who had worshipped at the
simple shrine, unquestioning, undoubting. The Roundheads dour, with
their pitiless creed, had failed to destroy its fragrant sanctity, which
lingered in those foot-worn aisles like the memory of incense, the echo
of a monkish prayer. Was it all a great delusion?--or were our fathers
wise in their simplicity? In the past men had died for every faith;
to-day it would be hard to find men having any faith to die for.

A shadow crept over his mind, and although in his preoccupation he
failed to observe the fact, it corresponded with the coming of an
ominous cloud over the hill crest above and behind him; for we are but
human lutes upon which nature plays at will, now softly and gently, now
sounding chords of gladness, now touching to deep melancholy and the
grandeur of despair. The promise of those days of tropical heat was
about to be fulfilled, and already, three miles behind, black banks
lowered over the countryside turning its smile to a frown.

But even the remote booming of thunder failed to awaken Paul to the
reality of the brewing tempest; it reached him in his daydream, but as a
message not of the wrath of heaven but of the wrath of man. He mistook
it for the ceaseless voice of the guns and weaved it into his brooding
as Wagner wove the Valkyrie theme into the score of the _Nibeluengen_. A
faint breeze whispered through the tree-tops.

Paul came to the foot of the slope; and below him ran a continuous gully
roofed over by stunted trees and conforming to the hillside as a brim
conforms to a hat. Entrance might be made through any one of several
gaps, and Paul, scrambling down, found himself in a dark tunnel, its
brown, leafy floor patched at irregular intervals by grey light
reflected from the creeping thunder cloud. Right and left it went, this
silent gallery, and although he was unaware of the fact, it joined other
like galleries which encircled the slopes and met and intercrossed so
that one might wander for hours along these mystic aisles of the hills.
Below again, beyond a sloping woody thicket, lay the meadows and
f