The Library offered a worthy setting for high themes. The walls were, of course, wreathed in the pale golds and dignified browns of old books. A light gallery ran round three sides of the room, while a large perpendicular window at the farther end contained the armorial bearings of various benefactors of the see. Beneath the window was a bookcase containing several chained books--a Vulgate, a Saint Augustine, the _Summa_ of St. Thomas; precious possessions, and famous in the annals of early printing. And wherever there was a space of wall left free, pictures or engravings of former bishops and dignitaries connected with the Cathedral enforced the message and meaning of the room. A seemly, even beautiful place--pleasantly scented with old leather, and filled on this September afternoon with the sunshine which, on the Chase, was at the same moment kindling the heather into a blood-red magnificence. Here the light slipped in gently, subdued to the quiet note and standard of the old Library. The Dean was in the Chair. He was a man of seventy who had only just become an old man, submitting with difficulty, even with resentment, to the weight of his years. He wore a green shade over his eyes, beneath which his long sharp nose and pointed chin--in the practical absence of the eyes--showed with peculiar emphasis. He was of heavy build, and suffered from chronic hoarseness. In his youth he had been a Broad churchman and a Liberal, and had then passed, through stages mysterious to his oldest friends, into an actively dogmatic and ecclesiastical phase. It was rumoured that he had had strange spiritual experiences; a "vision" was whispered; but all that was really known was that from an "advanced" man, in the Liberal sense, he had become the champion of high orthodoxy in the Chapter, and an advocate of disestablishment as the only means of restoring "Catholic liberty" to the Church. The Dean's enemies, of whom he had not a few, brought various charges against him. It was said that he was a worldling with an undue leaning to notabilities. And indeed in every gathering, social or ecclesiastical, the track of the Dean's conversation sufficiently indicated the relative importance of the persons present. Others declared that during his long tenure of a country living he had left the duties of it mainly to a curate, and had found it more interesting to live in London, conferring with Cabinet Ministers on educational reform; while the women-folk of the Chapter pitied his wife, whose subdued or tremulous aspect certainly suggested that the Dean's critical and sarcastic temper sharpened itself at home for conflicts abroad.