there flowed back upon him, with startling force,
old impressions and traditions. He was in Cambridge again, a King's man,
attending King's Chapel. He was thinking of his approaching Schools, and
there rose in his mind a number of figures, moving or at rest, Cambridge
men like himself, long since dismissed from recollection. Suddenly memory
seemed to open out--to become full, and urgent, and emphatic. He appeared
to be living at a great rate, to be thinking and feeling with peculiar
force. Perhaps it was fever. His hands burnt.

"_My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my
Saviour!_"

As the chant rose, and he recognized the words, he felt extraordinarily
exalted, released, purified. Why not think away the past? It has no
existence, except in thought.

"I am what I conceive myself to be--who can prove me to be anything else?
What am I then! An educated man, with a mind--an intelligence. I have
damaged it, but there it is--still mine."

His eyes wandered, during the Lesson, to the line of sculptured Statesmen
in the north transept. He had taken History honours, and his thoughts
began to play with matter still stored in them: an essay on Dizzy and
Cobden he had written for a Cambridge club--or Gladstone's funeral, which
he had seen as a boy of seventeen. He had sat almost in this very place,
with his mother, who had taken pains to bring him to see it as an
historic spectacle which he might wish to remember. A quiet, dull woman,
his mother--taciturn, and something of a bookworm. She had never
understood him, nor he her. But she had occasionally shown moments of
expansion and emotion, when the soul within glowed a little through its
coverings; and he remembered the look in her eyes as the coffin
disappeared into the earth, amid the black-coated throng of Lords and
Commons. She had been for years a great though silent worshipper of Mr.
Gladstone, to the constant amusement of her Tory husband and sons.

Then, suddenly, a face, a woman's pretty face, in the benches of the
north transept, caught his eye, and with a leap, as of something
unchained, the beast within him awoke. It had reminded him of Rachel; and
therewith the decent memories of the distant past disappeared, engulfed
by the seething, ugly, mud-stained present. He was again crouching on the
hill-side, in the shelter of the holly, watching the scene within: Rachel
in that man's arms! Had the American seen him? He remembered his own
bac