el
silence. There was a hostility about the mood into which Standish
relapsed that seemed to bring in upon us some of the urgent sorrows of
the city outside, as if he had drawn aside a curtain to show us a world
alien to the place of beauty and of the making of beauty through which
Leila moved. Even she must have felt the import of his mood, for she let
her hands fall on the keys while Dick and I stared at each other before
the shock of this crackle that seemed to threaten the perfection of
their happiness.

From Brompton came the boom of the bell for evensong. Down Piccadilly
ran the roar of the night traffic, wending a blithesome way to places of
pleasure. It was the hour when London was wont to awaken to the thrill
of its greatness, its power, its vastness, its strength, and its glory,
and to send down luminous lanes its carnival crowd of men and women. It
was the time when weltering misery shrank shrouded into merciful gloom;
when the East End lay far from our hearts; when poverty and sin and
shame went skulking into byways where we need never follow; when painted
women held back in the shadows; when the pall of night rested like a
velvet carpet over the spaces of that floor that, by daylight, gave
glimpses into loathsome cellars of humanity. It was, as it had been so
often of late, an hour of serene beauty, that first hour of darkness in
a June night with the season coming to an end, an hour of dusk to be
remembered in exile or in age.

There should have come to us then the strains of an orchestra floating
in with the fragrance of gardenias from a vendor's basket, symbols of
life's call to us, luring us out beneath stars of joy. But, instead, the
bell of Brompton pealed out warningly over our souls, and, when its
clanging died, there drifted in the sound of a preaching voice.

Only phrases clattering across the darkness were the words from
beyond--resonant through the open windows: "The Cross is always ready,
and everywhere awaiteth thee.... Turn thyself upward, or turn thyself
downward; turn thyself inward, or turn thyself outward; everywhere thou
shalt find the Cross;... if thou fling away one Cross thou wilt find
another, and perhaps a heavier."

Like sibylline prophecy the voice of the unseen preacher struck down on
us. We moved uneasily, the four of us, as he cried out challenge to the
passing world before his voice went down before the surge of a hymn.
Then, just as the gay whirl of cars and omnibuses bea