s something
illuminating and intensifying her consciousness. She heard the vicar's
voice like a fine music playing in the background. Then organ and choir
burst into the anthem. It was a fugue; the voices seemed to have
gathered together from the ends of the world, flying, pursuing and
flying, doubled, trebled, quadrupled in their flight, they met and
parted, they overtook and were overtaken. And now it was no longer a
fugue of sounds--it was a fugue of all sensations. The incense rose and
mingled with the music; the music fled and rose, up among the clustering
gas-jets, up to the chancel roof where it lost itself in a shimmering
labyrinth of gold and sapphire, and died in a diminuendo of light and
sound. Audrey looked up, and as her eyes met Wyndham's, it seemed as if
a new and passionate theme had crashed into her fugue, dominating its
harmonies, while the whole rushed on, more intricate, more tumultuous
than before. Her individuality that had swum with the stream became
fluent and coalesced with it now, soul flooded with sense, and sense
with soul. She came to herself exhausted and shivering with cold.
Flaxman Reed was in the pulpit. He stood motionless, with compressed
lips and flashing eyes, as he watched the last deserters softly filing
out through the side-aisles. The lights were turned low in nave and
chancel; Ted wriggled in his seat until he commanded a good view of the
fine head, in faint relief against a grey-white pillar, stone on stone;
and Flaxman Reed flung out his text like a challenge to the world: "The
things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen
are eternal." The words suggested something piquantly metaphysical,
magnificently vague, and Audrey followed the sermon a little way. But
Flaxman Reed was in his austerest, most militant mood. He was a master
of antithesis, and to Audrey there was something repellent in his
steel-clad thoughts, his clear diamond-pointed sentences. No eloquence
had any charm for her that was not as water to reflect her image, or as
wind to lift and carry her along. Her fancy soon fluttered gently down
to earth, and she caught herself wondering whether Wyndham would walk
back to Piccadilly or go in a hansom.

She was still pursuing this train of thought as they left the church,
when she proposed that they should go back to Chelsea by Westminster
instead of Lambeth Bridge. Wyndham overtook them as they turned down to
the river by St. Thomas's Hospital. H