ting, pure and cold, across the hot
confusion in her brain, steadied her while it terrified.

Yet she knew the voice well enough. It was but John Romley's.
The Dean and Chapter wanted a precentor, and among a score of
candidates had selected Romley and two others for further trial.
This was his chance and he was using it; making the most of it, too,
to the mingled admiration and disgust of his rivals listening in the
choir beside him.

And she had dressed early and climbed to the cathedral, not to pray,
but to seek Romley because she had instant need of him; because,
though she respected his character very little, he was the one man in
the world who could help her. She had missed him at the door.
Entering, she learned from a verger that he was already robing.
Then the great organ sounded, and from habit she dropped on her
knees.

John Romley, unseen in the choir, was something very different from
John Romley in private life with his loose face and flabby handshake.
Old Mr. Wesley had once dismissed him contemptuously as _vox et
praeterea nihil_: but disembodied thus, almost a thing celestial, yet
subtly recalling home to her and ties renounced, the voice shook
Hetty's soul. For it came on her as the second shock of an ambush.
She had climbed to the cathedral with but half of her senses awake,
drowsed by love, by the long ride in the languorous night wind, by
the exhaustion of a long struggle ended, by her wondering
helplessness on arriving--the chill sunlight, the deserted street,
the strange voice behind the lodging-house door, the unfamiliar
passage and stairs. She had lived a lifetime in those hours, and for
the while Wroote Parsonage lay remote as a painful daily round from
the dream which follows it. Only the practical instinct, as it were
a nerve in the centre of her brain, awake and refusing to be drugged,
had kept sounding its alarm to rise and seek Romley; and though at
length she obeyed in a panic, she went as one walking in sleep.
The front of the cathedral, as she came beneath its shadow, overhung
her as a phantom drawn upon the morning sky, its tall towers
unsubstantial, trembling against the light, but harmless even should
they fall upon her. She entered as one might pass through a paper
screen.

The first shock came upon her then. She passed not out of sunlight
into sunlight, but out of sunlight into a vast far-reaching,
high-arching gloom, which was another world and another life; the
solem