ed off his stole and
came outside.

The whole aisle, it seemed, was empty, though there was still a
sprinkling of folks in the north aisle, right across the great space of
the nave; and he went down the whole length, down to the west end to
have a general look up the Cathedral.

He stood looking for three or four minutes.

Overhead hung the huge span of brickwork, lost in darkness, incredibly
vast and mysterious, with here and there emerging into faint light a
slice of a dome or the slope of some architrave-like dogmas from
impenetrable mystery. Before him lay the immense nave, thronged now with
close-packed chairs in readiness for the midnight Mass, and they seemed
to him as he looked with tired eyes, almost like the bent shoulders of
an enormous crowd bowed in dead silence of adoration. But there was
nothing yet to adore, except up there to the left, where a very pale
glimmer shone on polished marble among the shadows before the chapel of
the Blessed Sacrament. There was one other exception; for overhead,
against the half-lighted apse, where a belated sacristan still moved
about, himself a shadow, busy with the last preparations of the High
Altar--there burgeoned out the ominous silhouette of the vast hanging
cross, but so dark that the tortured Christ upon it was invisible....
Yet surely that was right on this night, for who, of all those who were
to adore presently the Child of joy, gave a thought to the Man of
Sorrows? His Time was yet three months away....

* * * * *

As the priest stood there, looking and imagining, with that strange
clarity of mind and intuition that a few hours in the confessional gives
to even the dullest brain, he noticed the figure of a man detach itself
from one of the lighted confessionals on the left and come down towards
him, walking quickly and lightly. To his surprise, this young man,
instead of going out at the northwest door, wheeled and came towards
him.

He noticed him particularly, and remembered his dress afterwards: it was
a very shabby dark blue suit, splashed with mud from the Christmas
streets, very bulgy about the knees; the coat was buttoned up tightly
round a muffler that had probably once been white, and his big boots
made a considerable noise as he came.

The priest had a sudden impulse as the young man crossed him.

"A merry Christmas," he said.

The young man stopped a moment and smiled all over his face, and the
priest notice