this dramatic symbolism and
movement, waiting for them below, in the church of their fathers?

So that all were here, old and young, children and youths, fathers just
home from their work, mothers with their babies, girls with their
sweethearts. Their happy yet reverent familiarity with the old church,
their gay and natural participation in the ceremony that was going on,
made on Diana's alien mind the effect of a great multitude crowding to
salute their King. There, in the midst, surrounded by kneeling acolytes
and bending priests, shone the Mystic Presence. Each man and woman and
child, as they passed out of the shadow into the light, bent the knee,
then parted to either side, each to his own place, like courtiers well
used to the ways of a beautiful and familiar pageantry.

An old peasant in a blouse noticed the English ladies, beckoned to them,
and with a kind of gracious authority led them through dark chapels,
till he had placed them in the open space that spread round the flaming
altar, and found them seats on the stone ledge that girdles the walls.
An old woman saying her beads looked up smiling and made room. A baby or
two ran out over the worn marble flags, gazed up at the gilt-and-silver
angels hovering among the candles of the altar, and was there softly
captured--wide-eyed, and laughing in a quiet ecstasy--by its
watchful mother.

Diana sat down, bewildered by the sheer beauty of a marvellous and
incomparable sight. Above her head shone the Giotto frescos, the
immortal four, in which the noblest legend of Catholicism finds its
loveliest expression, as it were the script, itself imperishable, of a
dying language, to which mankind will soon have lost the key.

Yet only dying, perhaps, as the tongue of Cicero died--to give birth to
the new languages of Europe.

For in Diana's heart this new language of the spirit which is the child
of the old was already strong, speaking through the vague feelings and
emotions which held her spellbound. What matter the garment of dogma and
story?--the raiment of pleaded fact, which for the modern is no fact? In
Diana, as in hundreds and thousands of her fellows, it had
become--unconsciously--without the torment and struggle of an older
generation--Poetry and Idea; and all the more invincible thereby.

Above her head, Poverty, gaunt and terrible in her white robe, her skirt
torn with brambles, and her poor cheek defaced by the great iron hook
which formerly upheld the San