They were at Father Cyprian's door by this time, in one of those wide streets west of Portland Place, and north of the world of fashion. Streets that may still be described as quiet, save for the ceaseless roar of traffic in the Marylebone Road, a sound diminished by distance, the ebb and flow of life in an artery of the great city. It was in a street parallel with this that the great Cardinal who defied the law of England had lived and died half a century before. They had been walking slowly through the thickening mist of a fine November evening, a grey vapour, across which street lamps and lighted windows glimmered in faint flashes of gold, an atmosphere that Claude Rutherford loved, all the more, perhaps, because he had never been able to satisfy himself in painting it. "What is the good of trying, when one must always fall short of Turner?" he had said to himself in those younger and more eager days when he still tried to do things. Father Cyprian had talked with a kind of suppressed passion as they walked through solitary streets, and now he laughed lightly, as he turned the key in his door. "You have had the sermon after all," he said. "It didn't touch me. I am not an extravagant, bridge-playing woman, and I worship no strange god." "I shall touch you presently; your withers are not unwrung." "Suppose I say good night and give you the slip." "You won't do that. I was your father's friend." That was enough. Claude bent his head a little, as if at a sacred name, and followed the priest up the uncarpeted stone staircase to a large room on the first floor--the conventional London drawing-room, with its three long windows and chilling white linen blinds. But, except the shape of the room and the white blinds, there was nothing to offend the eye that looked for beauty. The floor was cheaply covered with sea-blue felt, which echoed the colouring of the sea-blue walls, and the central space was occupied by a massive knee-hole desk of ebony, inlaid with ivory, evidently of Italian workmanship, and picturesque enough to please without being a _chef d'oeuvre_. There were only two objects of art in the spacious room, but each was supreme after its kind. A carved ivory crucifix of considerable size, mounted on black velvet, was centred on the wall facing the windows; and over the marble mantelpiece there hung a Holy Family by Fra Angelico. These, which were exquisite, were the only ornaments that Father Cyprian had given himself, in his ten years' residence in this house, where this spacious sitting-room, with a large bedroom for himself and a small room for his servant, comprised all his accommodation.