We had walked perhaps two squares, when Reinhart stopped just as suddenly as if he might have come in contact with a stone wall, invisible to me. Alarmed, I said, quickly, “What is the matter? Are you ill?” “No,” he replied, still standing motionless. Then, in a moment, without another word, he turned and began retracing his steps. “Are you going home already?” I inquired, puzzled by his strange conduct. “No; I am going to the Cathedral.” We had just passed the Cathedral, when he had made no motion to enter; but now I tried in vain to dissuade him from it. I told him that there was no service at this hour; that we might as well not have left home as to go inside of any house. All to no purpose; he was just as determined as at first, until finally he turned fiercely upon me and said, with a strange emphasis in his tone,— “I will go; I must go; I feel something within me that _compels_ me to go!” Was this again the vibration of that terrible chord in his nature—that terrible chord that threatened to destroy forever the harmony of his life? Powerless to turn him from his intent, together we crossed the northern portal and entered the nave. It was so dim that the heavy shadows clustered in a rayless cloud among the arches, and at the end, far off—they looked like stars in the gloom—flickered a few tapers at the altar, while higher up swung the sacred but sickly flame that had been burning for centuries. There was not a stir, not a sound. I trembled all over with a singular sensation of weakness that came upon me as I followed Reinhart, who went steadily down the long aisle to where the transepts met, then stopped as abruptly as he had stopped a few moments before in the street. It was, as I have said, just where the transepts met. There, upon a low platform or dais, stood a bier covered by a velvet pall, whose heavy border fell in waveless folds. And upon it rested a casket with silver mountings. Beside it two tapers burned, one at the head and one at the foot; and two monks kneeled, motionless. Beyond the choir I saw the gleam of the organ-pipes, wavering, come and go. The altar lights circled about each other, and they, too, receded in infinite space; they grew dim; they vanished; they sprang again; they fled again. The great tombs loomed out and faded; the figure on an ebon crucifix, inspired with life, writhed in fearful agony, then once more became transfixed, and the weak, trembling sensation under which I had been laboring was gone.