ter a moment's satisfaction
with this last fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of
metaphor. That was not his way. To find out what lay at the bottom of
this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any,
the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of
circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was
capable of--in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living
nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of work for the year 1896.

Making a mental note of several of the above phrases for future use,
Wyndham knocked the ashes out of his pipe and went to bed, where he
dreamed that the Devil, in evening dress, was presenting him with
Audrey's soul--done up in a brown wrapper marked "MS. only"--for
dissection.

CHAPTER XI

It was in no direct accordance with his literary plans, though it may
have been preordained in some divine scheme of chances, that Wyndham
found himself next Sunday attending evensong at St. Teresa's, Lambeth.
It so happened that Audrey and the Havilands had chosen that very
evening to go and hear, or, as Ted expressed it, see Flaxman Reed. He
wanted Flaxman Reed's head for a study. Ted seldom condescended to enter
any church of later date than the fifteenth century, and,
architecturally speaking, he feared the worst from St. Teresa's. Indeed,
smoke, fog, and modern Gothic genius have made the outside of that
building one with the grimy street it stands in, and Ted was not
prepared for the golden beauty of the interior. His judgment halted as
if some magic effect of colour had blinded it to stunted form and
pitiful perspective. But the glory of St. Teresa's is its music. The
three late-comers were shown into seats in the chancel as the choir were
singing the _Magnificat_. Music was the one art to which Audrey's nature
responded spontaneously after its kind. She knelt down and covered her
face with her hands for a prayer's space, while the voices of the choir
and organ shook her on every side with a palpable vibration. She was
conscious then of a deep sense of religion merging in a faint
expectancy, a premonition of things to follow. She rose from her knees
and found an explanation of this in the fact that Langley Wyndham was
standing in the opposite seat below the choir. She was not surprised;
for her the unexpected was always about to happen. It had happened now.

She tried not to see or think of him; but she felt him a