ropping into the oblivion which their
intrinsic insignificance would naturally have involved--why they were
remembered and individualized by herself and others through after
years--was simply that she unknowingly stood, as it were, upon the
extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in which the real
meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It was the last hour of
experience she ever enjoyed with a mind entirely free from a knowledge
of that labyrinth into which she stepped immediately afterwards--to
continue a perplexed course along its mazes for the greater portion of
twenty-nine subsequent months.

The Town Hall, in which Cytherea sat, was a building of brown stone, and
through one of the windows could be seen from the interior of the room
the housetops and chimneys of the adjacent street, and also the upper
part of a neighbouring church spire, now in course of completion under
the superintendence of Miss Graye's father, the architect to the work.

That the top of this spire should be visible from her position in the
room was a fact which Cytherea's idling eyes had discovered with some
interest, and she was now engaged in watching the scene that was being
enacted about its airy summit. Round the conical stonework rose a cage
of scaffolding against the blue sky, and upon this stood five men--four
in clothes as white as the new erection close beneath their hands, the
fifth in the ordinary dark suit of a gentleman.

The four working-men in white were three masons and a mason's labourer.
The fifth man was the architect, Mr. Graye. He had been giving
directions as it seemed, and retiring as far as the narrow footway
allowed, stood perfectly still.

The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall was curious
and striking. It was an illuminated miniature, framed in by the dark
margin of the window, the keen-edged shadiness of which emphasized by
contrast the softness of the objects enclosed.

The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty feet, and the
five men engaged thereon seemed entirely removed from the sphere and
experiences of ordinary human beings. They appeared little larger
than pigeons, and made their tiny movements with a soft, spirit-like
silentness. One idea above all others was conveyed to the mind of a
person on the ground by their aspect, namely, concentration of purpose:
that they were indifferent to--even unconscious of--the distracted world
beneath them, and all that