ional events, still thrust up its
skeleton silhouette against the pale sky. To the priest's
surprise the silhouette was largely filled in.

A figure came towards them, saluted, and stood waiting.

"Eh? Who's this?" snapped the General.

"The look out, sir. We've orders to watch Rye."

"Why?"

"The wireless is out of communication, sir. His lordship arranged
a week ago that there should be supplementary rockets."

"Where are the guns?" asked Monsignor, who was looking about him,
at the empty leads, the battlemented parapet against the sky, and
then back at the servant's figure.

"Down below, father. They're to be fired from here if three white
rockets go up."

While the two others still talked, the priest went to the side and
looked over, again suddenly overwhelmed by the strangeness of the
whole position. Once again there came on him the sense of
irresponsible unreality. . . . He stared out, hardly seeing that
on which he looked: the grey mass of the lower castle beneath with
lighted windows, at the blankness beyond, again with the scattered
lights--the nearer ones, within what seemed a stone's throw, along
the village street--the farther ones, infinitely remote, out upon
the invisible sea. There again too, far off across the land, shone
another cluster of lights, seen rather as a luminous patch, that
marked Rye. There too, eyes were watching; there too it was felt
that interests were at stake, so vast and so unknown, that heaven
or hell might be within their limits. He looked inland, and there
too was darkness, but darkness unrelieved. Near at hand,
immediately below the bounding walls, rose up the dark swelling
outlines that he knew to be the woods of the park, crowding up
against the very castle walls themselves; and beyond, dimness
after dimness, to meet the sky. . . .

It seemed to him incredible, as he looked, that things of such
moment should be under way, somewhere beyond that sleeping
country; and yet, as his eyes grew accustomed to the night, he
could make out at last a faint glow in the sky to the north that
marked the outskirts of that enormous city of which he was a
citizen, where such matters even now were approaching a decision.

For it was only little by little that he had become aware that a
real crisis was at hand. The Cardinal had told him the facts,
indeed, in the dispassionate, tolerant manner that was
characteristic of him; but the point of view necessary to take
them in as a coheren