side, pricked with lights here and there that burned before the images,
and giving an impression of immense height owing to its narrowness and
its length. The air was full of rolling sound, sonorous and full, that
echoed in the two high vaults on this side and that of the high altar,
was caught in the double transepts, and lost in the chapels that opened
in a corona of carved work at the further end, for the monks were busy
at the _Opus Dei_, and the psalms rocked from side to side, as if the
nave were indeed a great ship ploughing its way to the kingdom of
heaven.

There were a few seats at the western end, and into one of these
Christopher found his way, signing himself first from the stoup at the
door, and inclining before he went in. Then he leaned his chin on his
hands and looked eagerly.

It was difficult to make out details clearly at the further end, for the
church was poorly lighted, and there was no western window; the glare
from the white roads, too, along which he had come still dazzled him,
but little by little, helped by his own knowledge of the place, he began
to see more clearly.

* * * * *

High above him ran the lines of the clerestory, resting on the rounded
Norman arches, broken by the beam that held the mighty rood, with the
figures of St. Mary and St. John on either side; and beyond, yet higher,
on this side of the high altar, rose the lofty air of the vault ninety
feet above the pavement. To left and right opened the two western
transepts, and from where he knelt he could make out the altar of St.
Martin in the further one, with its apse behind. The image of St.
Pancras himself stood against a pillar with the light from the lamp
beneath flickering against his feet. But Christopher's eyes soon came
back to the centre, beyond the screen, where a row of blackness on
either side in the stalls, marked where the monks rested back, and where
he would soon be resting with them. There were candles lighted at sparse
intervals along the book-rests, that shone up into the faces bent down
over the wide pages beneath; and beyond all rose the altar with two
steady flames crowning it against the shining halpas behind that cut it
off from the four groups of slender carved columns that divided the five
chapels at the extreme east. Half-a-dozen figures sat about the nave,
and Christopher noticed an old man, his white hair falling to his
shoulders, two seats in front, beginning to