George forced a smile. He looked worn and jaded. Miss Vance noticed that his usually neat cravat was awry and his hands were gloveless. "Yes," he said. "It is a little church. The oldest in London. I want to show it to you." Miss Vance tied on Mrs. Waldeaux's bonnet, smoothing her hair affectionately. "There are too many gray hairs here for your age, Frances," she said. "George, you should keep your mother from worry and work. Don't let her hair grow gray so soon." George bowed. "I hope I shall do my duty," he said, with dignity. "Come, mother." As they drove down Piccadilly Mrs. Waldeaux chattered eagerly to her son. She could not pour out her teeming fancies about this new world to any body else, but she could not talk fast enough to him. Had they not both been waiting for a lifetime to see this London? "The thing," she said earnestly, as she settled herself beside him, "the thing that has impressed me most, I think, were those great Ninevite gods yesterday. I sat for hours before them while you were gone. There they sit, their hands on their knees, and stare out of their awful silence at the London fog, just as they stared at the desert before Christ was born. I felt so miserably young and sham!" George adjusted his cravat impatiently. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow you, mother. These little flights of yours---- They belong to your generation, I suppose. It was a more sentimental one than mine. You are not very young. And you certainly are not a sham. The statues are interesting, but I fail to see why they should have had such an effect upon you." "Oh!" said Frances. "But you did not stay alone with them as long as I did, or you would have felt it too. Now I am sure that the debates in Parliament impressed you just as they did me?" George said nothing, but she went on eagerly. It never occurred to her that he could be bored by her impressions in these greatest days of her life. "To see a half-dozen well-groomed young men settle the affairs of India and Australia in a short, indifferent colloquy! How shy and awkward they were, too! They actually stuttered out their sentences in their fear of posing or seeming pretentious. So English! Don't you think it was very English, George?" "I really did not think about it at all. I have had very different things to occupy me," said George, coldly superior to all mothers and Parliaments. "This is the church." The cab stopped before an iron door between two shops in the most thronged part of Bishopsgate Street. He pushed it open, and they passed suddenly out of the hurrying crowd into the solemn silence of an ancient dingy building. A dim light fell through a noble window of the thirteenth century upon cheap wooden pews. The church was empty, and had that curious significance and half-spoken message of its own which belongs to a vacant house. "I remember," whispered Frances, awestruck. "This was built by the first Christian convert, St. Ethelburga."