and motives was a quiet concentration upon the little focus of
light about the choir, the gentle complete dominance of a voice
intoning. She slipped along the aisle and into the nave and made her way
to a seat. How good this was! Outside she had felt large, awkwardly
responsible, accessible to missiles, a distressed conspicuous thing;
within this living peace she suddenly became no more than one of a
tranquil hushed community of small black-clad Lenten people; she found a
chair and knelt and felt she vanished even from her own
consciousness....

How beautiful was this place! She looked up presently at the great
shadowy arcs far above her, so easy, so gracious that it seemed they had
not so much been built by men as shaped by circling flights of angels.
The service, a little clustering advance of voices unsustained by any
organ, mingled in her mind with the many-pointed glow of candles. And
then into this great dome of worship and beauty, like a bed of voices
breaking into flower, like a springtime breeze of sound, came Allegri's
Miserere....

Her spirit clung to this mood of refuge. It seemed as though the
disorderly, pugnacious, misunderstanding universe had opened and shown
her luminous mysteries. She had a sense of penetration. All that
conflict, that jar of purposes and motives, was merely superficial; she
had left it behind her. For a time she had no sense of effort in keeping
hold of this, only of attainment, she drifted happily upon the sweet
sustaining sounds, and then--then the music ceased. She came back into
herself. Close to her a seated man stirred and sighed. She tried to get
back her hold upon that revelation but it had gone. Inexorably, opaque,
impenetrable doors closed softly on her moment of vision....

All about her was the stir of departure.

She walked out slowly into the cold March daylight, to the leaden greys,
the hurrying black shapes, the chaotic afternoon traffic of London. She
paused on the steps, still but half reawakened. A passing omnibus
obtruded the familiar inscription, "International Stores for Staminal
Bread."

She turned like one who remembers, to where her chauffeur stood waiting.

Sec.3

As her motor car, with a swift smoothness, carried her along the
Embankment towards the lattice bar of Charing Cross bridge and the
remoter towers of the Houses of Parliament, grey now and unsubstantial
against the bright western sky, her mind came back slowly to her
particular issues i