t time, stood together as soul
and body united in one personality.

If Victoria Street suggested such a thought as this, Parliament
Square drove it home. As the coach drew up at the west door of
the Abbey, and Monsignor stepped out with his robes about him, he
heard, like a ground-bass to the ecstatic pealing of the bells
overhead, the great roar of welcome roll out over the wide space,
reverberate back from Westminster Hall and the Government
Buildings opposite, and die down into heart-shaking silence
again, as the vermilion flash was seen at the Abbey doors. The
great space was filled in every foot with a crowd that was of one
heart and soul in its welcome of this formal act of restitution.

Within, the monks waited, headed by their abbot, in a wide circle
of some hundred persons, in the extreme end of the nave about the
door. The proper formalities were carried out; and the seculars,
led by the Cardinals, passed up the enormous church, between the
tapestries that hung from every pillar, to the music of the _Ecce
Sacerdos magnus_.

The old monuments were gone, of course--removed to St.
Paul's--and for the first time for nearly three hundred years it
was possible to see the monastic character of the church as its
builders had designed it. Over the screen hung now again the
Great Rood with Mary and John; and the altars of the Holy Cross
and St. Benedict stood on either side of the choir-gates.

And so they waited, the Cardinals in their thrones beside the
high-altar, and the man who had lost his memory beside them;
while the organ pealed out continuously overhead and endless
footsteps went to and fro over the carpeted ways and the open
stone spaces of the transepts. Once more upon this man, so
bewildered by this new world in which he found himself,
descended a flood of memories and half-perceived images. He
looked up to the far-off vaulted roof and the lantern beneath
the central tower; he looked down the long row of untenanted
stalls; across the transepts, clean and white again now as at
the beginning, filled from end to end across the floor with the
white of surplices and the dusky colours of half the religious
habits of the world; he caught here and there the gleam of
candle-flames and gold and carving from the new altars, set back
again, so far as might be, in their old stations; and again it
seemed to him that he had lived in some world of the
imagination, as if he saw things which kings and prophets had
de