which awaits him who blasphemes. To the verge of that Hell he had drifted.... He pictured himself lost in eternal torment. The Christ he saw had grown pitiless. He saw Christ standing in judgment amid a white million of youths.... Too weak to think clearly, he sat dreaming. The blazing fire decorated the darkness, and the twilight shed upon curtains purfled with birds and petals. He sat, his head resting on his large, strong fingers, pining for sharp-edged mediaeval tables and antique lamps. The soft, diffused light of the paper-shaded lamp jarred his intimate sense of things. However dim the light of his antique lamps, their beautiful shapes were always an admonition, and took his thoughts back to the age he loved--an age of temples and disciples. Recollection of Plato floated upon his weak brain, and he remembered that the great philosopher had said that there were men who were half women, and that these men must perforce delight in the society of women. That there were men too who were wholly men, and that these perforce could find neither pleasure nor interest away from their own sex. He had always felt himself to be wholly male, and this was why the present age, so essentially the age of women, was repellent to him. His thoughts floated from Greece to Palestine, and looking into the blaze he saw himself bearing the banner of the Cross into the land of the infidel, fighting with lance and sword for the Sepulchre. He saw the Saracen, and trembling with aspiration, he heard the great theme of salvation to the Saviour sung by the basses, by the tenors, by the altos; it was held by a divine boy's voice for four bars high up in the cupola, and the belief theme in harp arpeggios rained down like manna on the bent heads of the knights. Awaking a little, his thoughts returned to the consideration of his present condition. He had been ill, death had been by his bedside, and in that awful moment he had blasphemed. He could conceive nothing more terrible, and he thanked God for his great mercy. If worldly life was a peril he must fly from that peril, the salvation of his soul must be his first consideration. His thoughts lapsed into dreams--dreams of aisle and cloister, arches and legended panes. Palms rose in great curls like the sky, and beautiful harmonies of voices were gathered together, grouped and single voices, now the white of the treble, now the purple of the bass, and these, the souls of the carven stone, like birds hovering, like birds in swift flight, like birds poising, floated from the arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian, and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments; the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of God had descended upon him. V.